A Seif Bet - for those who still believe a word he, or AP, says

[ThWi]

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I have yet to see suspect HHs from before August, so it would be a huge help if someone out there could produce some and post them on 2p2.

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I agree! There must be many HH of suspect sessions if the cheating has gone on for a long time before August. Very important, though: If a handful of hands are posted that substantiates the claim of hole-card cheating then all other hands from the same session shold also be posted. Cherry picking of "suitable" hands in this situation would be very damaging to any case against AP.

[Weevil99]

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AP claims the hole was created in June and it was first exploited partway through August.

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There is probably only one way for AP to regain the trust of most of us. If they are telling the truth about when the hole was "created," they can prove it by releasing the source code, heavily annotated by the developers, along with the source code for the exploiting software, also heavily annotated. Along with that, they would have to explain exactly who developed the exploit, what their role was in the development process, and how the exploit ended up in the hands of A.J./Tom/whoever. In other words, they need to tell the complete story, leaving nothing out, and show us the source.

This would, most likely, make the AP system too dangerous to play right away, so to stay viable AP would have to become a skin of UB, their sister poker site. It's a massive undertaking, but this is a massive scandal and it calls for massive measures. Only the source code will prove they're telling the truth, and from this point on, the burden will be on AP to prove they are telling the truth in anything they say.

My personal suspicion is that they are not telling the truth. The simplest explanation is that this super-account has always been there.

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Whether you believe that or not is another story. I don't think I believe it 100%, but I also don't really think this has been going on for years on a relatively covert level followed by a month or so of complete madness that was the most obvious cheating in the history of poker.

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I don't have a hard time believing this at all. It's easy to imagine that the super-account was used sparingly for a long, long time. The old claim about poker rooms never daring to cheat because of all they would be risking applies here. They had a gravy train going. Tons of money pouring in. Why would they risk all that? The answer is that for the most part, they wouldn't, even if they had the ability to.

But...people are people. Everybody's different. Every additional person who gets in on the super-user thing increases the probability that one of them, eventually, will start using it carelessly, even recklessly.

It probably started small. Maybe one of them got much bolder with the cheating than anyone had in the past and took down a good-sized bundle in one night. He might have spent the next week on pins and needles worrying that someone might have noticed his irregular play. When nothing happened and no one even mentioned it, he went, "Huh."

It took, as you put it, "the most obvious cheating in the history of poker" for us to notice it at all, and even then there was plenty of doubt and skepticism in the poker community. If that raw .xls file had not been accidentally mailed out, this whole story would have died a month ago and the cheaters would have gotten away with everything. Only the irrefutable proof in that file made this more than a thin accusation in many people's eyes.

There is a chance that AP is actually telling the truth about when the exploit was created. I don't believe they are, but they could be. There is, as far as I can see, only one way to remove all doubt.

[Python49]

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wow great post, not what i was expecting

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I knew that post would make iketoys wet his pants soon as I read it.

On another note, if the context which is being used to determine guilt or innocence is hardcore proof well then obviously Mark would come out looking clean because the people who hold the smoking gun for that one are his friends and have destroyed that evidence. That does not mean anyone with common sense would say "Oh! well theres no evidence here so he must be innocent". That's just ignorant imo. In Mark's case he had motive and opportunity presumably if he was friends with Scott Tom and the others involved in the scandal. But I do understand that's not enough to hold up as evidence in the US... so yeah I agree theres nothing that can be done. Hell, in US courts since there wasn't 100% evidence against OJ Simpson he got to walk, "hey look, this glove doesn't fit!". That doesn't mean that people can't put two and two together and use their intuitions to decide if they want to believe he's guilty or innocent.

[Python49]

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Look, I understand you point of view. Lawyers deal with facts, and here we don't have facts (and never will). I am dealing with informed speculation that certainly seems valid given the situation.


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Exactly.

If we wanted to just deal with facts and no speculation at all then really we never would have gotten anywhere in the first place. Because truth of the matter is, that PotRipper tournament as damning as it may be is still not "100%" evidence. Nor are the PT statistics. None of that is concrete 100% incriminating evidence, so does that mean we were wrong to go with it and dig deeper?

And before those who are now jumping on the bandwagon of not following anything without solid evidence chime in to point out the varying degree of evidence we had in the stats of the super users on AP with what people are assuming about Mark, I understand that it's a huge difference in evidence, save your breath. The point though is that it doesn't make sense to not make any logical assumptions with the information you DO have. When people start making assumptions about there being a super user account #363 what true evidence did we have that that account could see the hole cards? What concrete evidence was there that he wasn't just observing and that there was another method being used to cheat? None. People were making logical assumptions based on the information there was.

People saying that Mark can be proven guilty of something are obviously 100% wrong, but shooting down people that are merely speculating and trying to put pieces of the puzzel together to make sense is illogical. At the beginning of any investigation, cops have to just work off leads and clues, they have nothing concrete. And i'm sure theres been plenty of investigations where everything makes sense to the detectives and they are positive the person did it, but because there wasn't 100% incriminating evidence, the offender can't be prosecuted (See OJ Simpson). Not having enough evidence to be proven guilty does not mean those that still believe he's guilty are wrong, just means they can't prove anything due to a technicality which is exactly what happened with Mark since the holders of the needed evidence were AP.

[dlk9s]

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Here's Nat weighing in on Seif's chat comments about the potripper tournament.

To this day, Seif is STILL trying to sow doubt about cheating in that tournament.

He just posted on 2p2 that potripper may have ACCIDENTALLY clicked call at the end of that tournament instead of fold.

Give us a f'ng break Seif.

IT WASN'T AN ACCIDENT. IT WAS CHEATING.

You earned the title of LIAR with your comments about the potripper tournament.

It is not a big stretch from LIAR to CHEATER.

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I suggest you go back and read what Mark Seif wrote. He said he was assured by AP that seeing hole cards was impossible, an assurance which he believed, naive of him or not. Thus, he looked at the HH from the angle of trying to justify the plays, since he incorrectly believed that POTRIPPER couldn't see everyone's cards.

He even said he thought it looked suspicious. To the final hand, he said that there were "...possible, albeit rare, explanations." He never said a mis-click was definitely the reason for the call. He said it was a rare possibility.

He then finishes his bullet point #4 by saying he and the other player who looked at the HH were "mistaken."

Seif admits that his analysis of the HH was incorrect and that there was cheating going on. I don't know why you keep asserting that he is still trying to justify the plays.

[Arnold_O]

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I am a California attorney. So is Mark Seif. Reporting him to the bar at this time is pointless. I can't imagine the bar investigating this mess, and it had nothing to do with the practice of law.

If there is ever credible evidence of him cheating or otherwise stealing from players at AP, I'll lead the charge. But I haven't seen a single shred of evidence that leads me to believe that Seif was involved and/or personally gained from this scandal at all.

You don't have to like him, and you don't need to think he is a good public speaker - I agree with the masses that the latest interview was nothing short of a bloody third trimester abortion of an attempt at addressing the AP scandal. You can think that he is the biggest douchebag in the poker world since Dutch Boyd. None of that makes him a thief. None of it.

The fact that he is so unpopular here, yet no one has found anything on him yet and no one on the inside at AP forwarded anything to Nat or Adar or Josem leads me to believe that Seif - to the extent that he says he never cheated or gained from the superuser account capability - is telling the truth.

Seriously though, if you get hard evidence of him cheating beyond some very weak accusations surrounding a HU session from two years ago, I'll carry the flag in the charge to the state bar disciplinary committee.

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i agree with this guy.

that story about mark seif folding to the fullhouse is nothing but a vicious lie and i believe it was exposed for that.

mark seif is innocent and people should not be jhating on the guy.

people should be hating on AJ Green and Scott Tom.

Time would be better spent seeing to it that Costa Rica prosecutes the living hell out of these crooks and throws them in prison for several years.

[Dan Druff]

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I am a California attorney. So is Mark Seif. Reporting him to the bar at this time is pointless. I can't imagine the bar investigating this mess, and it had nothing to do with the practice of law.

If there is ever credible evidence of him cheating or otherwise stealing from players at AP, I'll lead the charge. But I haven't seen a single shred of evidence that leads me to believe that Seif was involved and/or personally gained from this scandal at all.

You don't have to like him, and you don't need to think he is a good public speaker - I agree with the masses that the latest interview was nothing short of a bloody third trimester abortion of an attempt at addressing the AP scandal. You can think that he is the biggest douchebag in the poker world since Dutch Boyd. None of that makes him a thief. None of it.

The fact that he is so unpopular here, yet no one has found anything on him yet and no one on the inside at AP forwarded anything to Nat or Adar or Josem leads me to believe that Seif - to the extent that he says he never cheated or gained from the superuser account capability - is telling the truth.

Seriously though, if you get hard evidence of him cheating beyond some very weak accusations surrounding a HU session from two years ago, I'll carry the flag in the charge to the state bar disciplinary committee.

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i agree with this guy.

that story about mark seif folding to the fullhouse is nothing but a vicious lie and i believe it was exposed for that.

mark seif is innocent and people should not be jhating on the guy.

people should be hating on AJ Green and Scott Tom.

Time would be better spent seeing to it that Costa Rica prosecutes the living hell out of these crooks and throws them in prison for several years.

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Say what?

Nothing was proven to be a "vicious lie" because no hand histories ever surfaced.

That's the whole problem here.

These histories SHOULD be available, and they're not -- and it's far more AP's duty to supply them than it is Mark's opponent's duty to have them himself from an old computer that broke in 2006.

For the record, I know the guy who made the post about the match, and he has never lied in the 3 years I've known him. I was not a direct witness to this match, so I cannot comment myself, but the poster of that accusation was (and still is) a respected high-limit player, not just some random fool.

[Arnold_O]

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Say what?

Nothing was proven to be a "vicious lie" because no hand histories ever surfaced.

That's the whole problem here.

These histories SHOULD be available, and they're not -- and it's far more AP's duty to supply them than it is Mark's opponent's duty to have them himself from an old computer that broke in 2006.

For the record, I know the guy who made the post about the match, and he has never lied in the 3 years I've known him. I was not a direct witness to this match, so I cannot comment myself, but the poster of that accusation was (and still is) a respected high-limit player, not just some random fool.

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okay, maybe i jumped the gun there.

btw, anyone out there pushing the costan rican authorities to prosecute? someone needs to get on it.

isn't this why AJ Green fled back to canada?

i assume Canada has an extradition treaty with Costa Rica

[bustowithnobra]

My feeling is he's the spokesperson and part owner, but it in his contract to go out of his way to defend a cheating scandal??? Why would he go through such leaps and bounds, would Ivey do that for Full Tilt?

[LuckyMux]

Enough of the 'there's not enough evidence to convict in a court of law'. THIS IS A POKER FORUM, NOT A COURT OF LAW.

It ain't going to a court of law, we know that. A dozen shell companies based out of Costa Rica and the erasure of incriminating data is making sure of it.

Had this all happened in the US (regulation, PLEASE), those servers and hand histories would now be in the hands of the Feds, and being recovered. Then we might have the evidence we so long to see.

What evidence do we have? We have a company that admits fraud at the very top. We have Mark Seif declaring he was Director of Operations in 2005. What's his role now? Good luck in finding out. According to his TV interview, he obviously still has a hand in management decisions - oh, but although AP press releases come via his blog, don't call him a spokesman...

He also lied in that TV interview (but hey, he wasn't under oath so it doesn't matter, right?). When faced with the allegation HE cheated, he doesn't even bother to deny it, but instead claims Nat has unequivocally said he did nothing wrong.

No, Nat hasn't. Ever. What's the convention about lying witnesses again? Is it along the lines of 'unreliable testimony'?

In the same interview, after saying that AP has paid back upwards of a million dollars already (seems too high if they only have two months of HH to go on, but hey), he blathers on about 'if' they've done something wrong. If!

Anyway, as I've posted myself before, there is indeed a Western convention that we presume innocence. My first post about Seif said that I was certain he was just in an embarrassing position thanks to misplaced trust (it's on Pokerati, responding to his audio interview). I no longer believe that.

I agree there isn't enough evidence to 'convict in a court of law' - but if this were actually GOING to a court of law, AP would have been raided and that evidence would be found. It's not as if AP is going to do or say anything that harms Mark Seif - he is a major stake owner, remember?

(There is also a Western convention that the likes of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson will never work again. Just a thought.)

PS. Arnold_O: you a funny guy! Friend of anyone we know?