UltimateBet Cheating Scandal Finally “News” (Sort of)

Weird how the internet works. (Or doesn’t.) It connects us all, yet most of us spend the majority of our time on the web rooting around in particular corners, never noticing much beyond the tiny little world created by our personal bookmarks & favorites.

On Tuesday, a thread was begun on Two Plus Two in the News, Views, and Gossip forum with a post that for the most part was something that had already appeared back in January over in the High Stakes No Limit forum –- a lengthy, highly-detailed summary of both the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet cheating scandals. The difference here was the post was prefaced with an earnest note for “the concerned reader to pass word of this summary on to other interested parties,” since “the spread of this information will ultimately protect poker players from unknowingly exposing themselves to the corruption detailed below.”

Hundreds of replies have followed, many clearly written by posters who had yet to be so thoroughly informed of the serious security breach that has occurred over at Ultimate Bet in the late summer of 2007. Have to say, I am glad to see people finally waking up to the problems at UB.

One sort of interesting detour in the thread -- interesting to me, anyway -- concerns someone having posted updates over on Wikipedia to the “Absolute Poker” and “Ultimate Bet” pages. Actually, I had noticed the Wikipedia updates earlier this week, since they happened to have involved Hard-Boiled Poker.

When you search for either “Absolute Poker” or “Ultimate Bet” on Wikipedia, you are redirected to the page for “Tokwiro Enterprises,” the company presently owning both AP and UB. At the very end of the entry, someone added a brief note mentioning that “Ultimate Bet is currently facing a cheating scandal similar in nature to that of Absolute Poker,” and had added two footnotes to that line –- one linking to a PokerWorks article by “California” Jennifer Newell, and the other linking to one of my more recent posts on the matter, “Report on Ultimate Bet Cheating ‘Scheme’ Due Soon.”

Shortly after that line had been added, the Wikipedia entry was edited once more and the line deleted. It has since been restored; however, only now the line has only one footnote linking to Jen’s article.

I understand why the footnote to Hard-Boiled Poker was removed, since technically speaking your humble servant does write under a pseudonym -- which is why I assume Wikipedia got rid of the link. Makes sense.

Truth be told -- and rest assured, dear reader, pseudonym or no, I’m only telling the truth over here -- I am no real authority on the matter, as all of my posts on the subject have primarily consisted of me passing along information I’d encountered elsewhere. Even so, the lamentable dearth of reporting on the Ultimate Bet scandal has kept Hard-Boiled Poker near the top of Google searches for “ultimate bet cheating” for the past couple of months or so. (Something I find more than a little confounding when I am looking for info.)

Shouldn’t be that way, I’d argue. In any event, following the lead of those who reposted the story over on the NVG forum of 2+2, I’m once again here to “pass word of this summary on to other interested parties.”

So if you aren’t up on what has happened at Ultimate Bet, go read the post now!

And pass it on.