Absolute Poker Scandal: An Inside Job

[Insty]

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(3) No account of this debacle is complete without the inclusion of AP's response. They spend a month reviewing the accounts and their play (the same hands leaked in the tournament, and more) and then make an OFFICIAL, PUBLIC statement saying everything was fine and there was no cheating. Not only is this an inside job, but AP is lying to us and trying to cover it all up.


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How many people work at Absoulute? How many people would check to see if anything dodgy went on?

Absolute Boss: Hey Guy, check and see if anyone cheated in that tournament.
Insider Guy: <looks busy for a while> Nope, all fine Boss.
Absolute Boss: Cool, I'll tell PR to send out the everything is fine email.
Insider Guy: Check out my new Porsche!

[KurtSF]

Thanks for correcting my mistake about the name.

Can anyone at 2+2 dump the IPs and emails of everyone who has posted in one of the AP superuser threads? Might be a trick just to get a list of all the threads, let alone IPs.

[Sciolist]

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We haven't talked about much yet about the fact that we have the cheater's EMAIL, don't we? e.g. we have Absolute UserID 363's email (or at least the one that he used to register his account, right?) Do we also have the email address of the other mysterious observer with the same IP address? How about POTRIPPER or GRAYCAT? Do we have theirs?

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We don't have the ip or email of POTRIPPER or GRAYCAT

[HatesLosing]

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HOLY [censored] THEY CAN SEE UR WHOLE CARDS AT ABSOLUT POOKER!?!?!?

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For some reason I detect a hint of sarcasm there. No, for once this is actually serious and not someone saying "OMG I GOTZ RIVERED SO ONLINE POKER IS RIGGED!!!"

[VNH]

Just a couple of things to add, from the perspective of a retired I.T. Consultant and Manager . . .

First, regarding the question of whether AP was likely ignorant of what happened, or whether they were "involved". In large I.T. environments, it is common (and required nowadays with SarbOx) to have a division of roles and responsiblities among I.T. personnel. However, in small shops (like Absolute), especially overseas, it is common to have the Fox guarding the hen house. In other words, you might ask your favorite software development programmer/analyst to act as your security officer too. So it is conceivable, in this case, that the "inside person(s)" may have been called upon by AP Management to look into the complaints and allegations that the company has been receiving. And of course, for a while, such person(s) may be capable of convincing Management that these allegations are baseless.

I realize that this is speculative. I only raise this point to illustrate that it is very possible that AP has in fact been truly ignorant of the actual events. Of course, even if they have been ignorant up to this point, I'm sure, with the pressure they are now experiencing, that they will begin looking beyond their own trusted personnel for answers here.

Second, for those digging into the technical aspects of how this could have been done, I just want to remind you that strictly speaking, a super-user capability may have been achieved with indirect (rather than direct) access to the "magic file" (that contains the hole card info).

1. The data could be sent directly from the program variables, before they have ever made it to a file.

2. If some form of journaling or redundancy is in place (logging all DB changes that have occured to the "magic file" for data recovery purposes), then that data could be tapped instead of the primary file.

[KurtSF]

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We haven't talked about much yet about the fact that we have the cheater's EMAIL, don't we? e.g. we have Absolute UserID 363's email (or at least the one that he used to register his account, right?) Do we also have the email address of the other mysterious observer with the same IP address? How about POTRIPPER or GRAYCAT? Do we have theirs?

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We don't have the ip or email of POTRIPPER or GRAYCAT

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No, we have the email of the suspected superuser, account #363.

We also have the email of another account that was watching/playing from the same IP that may or may not belong to POTRIPPER.

[tireuw]

Were there any other users with numbers as low as (or close to) #363 at any of the other tournament tables. Basically, any other 3 or 4 digit numbers?

[KurtSF]

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Were there any other users with numbers as low as (or close to) #363 at any of the other tournament tables. Basically, any other 3 or 4 digit numbers?

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No.

[Deuce2High]

When is Sklansky going to get involved?

[Ship Ship McGipp]

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When is Sklansky going to get involved?

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