Absoulute Fraud?

[gotmarc]

Ok so what's the deal with Absolute Poker? A lot of people have Absolute Fraud as their picture and Someone mentione the Absolute "fiasco" in thier blog.

[Rek]

mmmmmm have you been visiting the moon recently?

[Beavis68]

someone was feeding hole cards in a tourney to a player in the game.

[pzhon]

Basically, there has been a cheating scandal at Absolute Poker. Players in high stakes limit cash games, NL cash games, and tournaments lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to cheaters who could see their hole cards. Apparently, it was done by insiders.

Absolute Poker has repeatedly lied about the cheating and threatened legal action against those disparaging it, but they finally admitted to some of the cheating and have been compensating the victims. The full scope of the cheating is not yet known.

See http://www.absolutedetectives.com/twiki/bin/view/ .

[Boise123]

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mmmmmm have you been visiting the moon recently?

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lol [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[pzhon]

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mmmmmm have you been visiting the moon recently?

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lol [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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This is the Beginners Questions forum, and it is quite appropriate to ask about this, and many other topics which may be well known to some experienced players.

While there was some coverage of the Absolute Poker scandal in the mass media between October 17th and 19th, it was far from overwhelming. There has been remarkably little coverage in poker periodicals, perhaps because the cheating only came to light over the past few weeks.

It's not obvious where to look for discussions of the scandal. For some reason, most of the threads have been in the Beats, Brags, and Variance forum, while it would be more natural to expect the discussion to take place in the Internet Gambling forum. Many of the threads don't tell the whole story, such as this current thread. You can wade through hundreds of posts and not find important details of what happened which are relevant to evaluating whether you might want to play on Absolute Poker (or Ultimate Bet, which is owned by the same company).

[BTMegaCash]

please ban or at least move to the sticky titled AP threads

[Rookcifer]

I don't understand why some players seem so forgiving of AP. I have never played there, but the whole story is highly disturbing and everyone who plays there should be outraged and immediately pull out their money.

Obviously the cheating accounts belonged to the highest "officials" at AP, so the whole organization (or at least those that run day to day operations) were likely involved or at least knew about the scheme. The really disturbing part is AP's denial that it is possible for their systems to be cracked. They reassured the world that such a compromise simply was not physically possible. Since the guys who did this don't appear to be expert computer hackers, it is likely that gaining a superuser status is much easier than AP would like to admit. Either the customer service reps at AP are complete imbeciles when it comes to computer security issues or they were lying about the security of their systems either in order to cover-up the scheme or out of ignorance of the scheme (either scenario is as bad as the other). It's likely the service reps were ignorant of the scheme, but it is still disturbing that they were not aware that a compromise was possible.

I have no clue how AP is set-up as far as ownership. To my understanding several corporations claim ownership. Further, I am not sure who they have appointed to be the "CEO" and who actually oversees day to day operations. Everyone online seems to think it is the same guy/s who the cheating accounts were tracked to. If these guys were indeed in charge during the cheating, I doubt that is the case now (but I am just speculating).

This isn't a case of some contracted IT computer nerd cracking the system in his spare time, this is a case of those in charge of the whole company abusing their power. If everything written by the AP sleuths is true, this is truly the Enron of online poker, and it could have been much worse if vigilant players didn't keep studying hand histories to expose the scheme.

This is why UIGEA needs to be repealed and why the US govt. should treat online poker like horse racing--legalize it and regulate it. This will keep poker from being ran by shady guys in foreign countries who have private jets full of millions of dollars in cash and often go under pseudonyms. Or at least, it will keep US players from having to play on these foreign run sites with no oversight or regulation.

I think no one should ever again play on AP.

[2hi4me2cu]

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mmmmmm have you been visiting the moon recently?

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[MrLove]

I think there system is wrong to begin with. The software should not allow anyone from the staff to see hole card during the hand this in the first place!

If you make a system like this one day something will go wrong.