AP - What should happen now

[thepokerpundit]

What an incredible saga ... but is there a way for AP to regain the trust of the poker playing community?

In my view, there are some serious thought lapses among some in the community (flame me if you want, but it's just my opinion)... to wit:

1) Nobody is going to jail. This private company operates in a foreign country - and all of its principals live in foreign countries. The reason they do this is to avoid the law, and they do it successfully. Pleas along the lines of "somebody has to go to jail" are pointless.

2) The principals in the company are playing the site. And, we'll never know which principals are doing so. Because this company is operating outside US law, it's free to have any policy it wants to regarding whether its employees, who clearly have access to inside information and software, can play the site. In all US-based BM casinos, regulations prohibit employees from playing at the casino. This is standard operating procedure. It's also standard operating procedure at ALL online sites that employees, some of whom have access to so-called "superuser" accounts at some sites, are allowed to play on the site.

Every online poker site has superuser accounts. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. You can't run a poker site WITHOUT some supervisory accounts. They are a security risk, easily exploited by trusted users. Evidence so far unearthed indicates that at some sites these are abused by the owners/operators of the sites to boost personal profits, skim from shareholders, etc. Hell, for all we know ... this is how they pay their employees.

3) You'll never know if you're being cheated by one of these employees. The ONLY way that any of this came to light is because of either a stupid policy, or a mistake, or a deliberate leak of the master database file for the Potripper tournament.

This fact is UNPRECEDENTED in the history of online poker. The master database of the tournament results is the HOLY GRAIL of poker. Properly analyzed, even you could become the world's best poker player - as you analyze how the top players play their game.

I can guarantee you that you'll never see another one. I would venture to say that every online card room is RIGHT NOW reassessing who has access to this data and how it might leak.

4) Every tournament in which these accounts played must be strictly scrutinized - and the only way to do that is for the community to have access to the master database files for each and every tournament played by Potripper and the other implicated accounts.

There simply is no other way to have trust. The master database files of all games (tournament or otherwise) must be released as part of the transparency effort. Anything less than that will require that the community trust. And since trust is what got us here in the first place, that seems to me to be a non sequiter.

5) That will not happen. Absolute Poker, its parent company, and sister company Ultimate Bet (home of Phil Helmuth) will just not offer the data up. They could. But they won't. They'll claim that they cannot, because they're prohibited from doing so, but we all know that they are bound by no laws - and so, could release the data to save themselves.

If they did - pouring over IP information would reveal the true extent of the play originating from their own internal workstations.

So, they wont.

6) Online poker is truly threatened by this. There have been many allegations of rigging in one form or another - many of them true. But, they are always laughed off as the bayings of donkeys lamenting their play. Let this be a lesson to the community. Allegations of cheating are to be taken seriously. Are there fish who accuse unjustly? Sure. Is cheating (collusion, card sharing, multi-accounting) occurring? Well, the Poker Stars World Championship of Online Poker doesn't have a world champ because he cheated. I think that answers the question "is there cheating going on."

The answer is it is RAMPANT, and the major sites don't want to do anything about it. For example: At Poker Stars, two accounts playing from the same IP address are allowed to play in the same MTT. There is nothing in the rules at Poker Stars which prevents this. What a stupid, head-in-the-sand policy. It sets the stage for cheating that isn't even thinly veiled and is the reason why the online kids are not getting seats at the adult gaming table in the United States.

Until the online companies start taking allegations of cheating seriously ... until they begin prohibiting their employees from playing their sites ... until they begin limiting IPs to single seats, nobody should take their claims of security seriously.

That's my 2 cents.

Flame on.

[jman220]

Op, consider deleting this post and posting it in the already existing AP thread. Otherwise, its probably just going to be deleted anyway. It did not need a new thread.

[wisehandpoker]

Your choice of nickname makes me question your judgment and therefore the validity of your post.

[Enervate]

merger with Ultimate Bet?

[adanthar]

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