Absolute Anticlimax

There was an item of news in the poker world last week, the sort of thing about which I might have written several blog posts had it occurred five or six years ago. After all, it was about an online poker site -- two sites, actually -- and cheating and scandal and illegality and all sorts of things your humble scribbler used to spend lots of time and energy opining about back in the day.

It has taken me a whole week even to acknowledge the story, though. Probably because it doesn’t affect me directly at all, and for those it does affect it has come so late as to make it seem we are in a place almost entirely distinct from where we all were when the story began.

It’s like one of those way, way, way late sequels. Or when a band who after shining brightly when young get back together many years later to try to reignite things with new material.

One of my faves, Robyn Hitchcock, actually has a new album out today (and the tracks I’ve heard are terrific). His old band, the Soft Boys, did one of those reunion records in the early 2000s about two decades after they’d split, and in an interview once he referred to it as “a bit of reactivating the undead by bringing back” and reanimating the band for that one-off.

That’s kind of how it feels writing about Absolute Poker and UltimateBet again, this time to report that almost six years after “Black Friday” -- the anniversary for which just passed -- players who had funds on Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and never were able to withdraw them are finally getting a chance to get that money back.

This has to be the slowest of any slow play in poker history.

For those keeping score, there were three sites named in the indictment and civil complaint unsealed on April 15, 2011 by the Department of Justice -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker -- with a fourth site, UltimateBet, then part of the “Cereus Network” along with Absolute, similarly affected by the DOJ’s action.

All four sites were subsequently prohibited from allowing players from the United States to continue playing on them. PokerStars shut us off right away. It took Full Tilt Poker an extra couple of days, but soon we got the stop-you-can’t-go-any-further pop-ups over there, too.

Both of those sites also made agreements with the feds right away to get back their domains (after they were momentarily seized). Those agreements involved ensuring funds went to the Americans, something PokerStars did immediately, but Full Tilt Poker never did, having shamefully squandered everyone’s money.

Eventually that led to the DOJ amending the civil complaint in September 2011 with further charges against Full Tilt Poker and new names added, and branding the site a “ponzi scheme” in an accompanying presser.

It took AP and UB a couple of extra weeks to make a similar agreement with the DOJ. Meanwhile, the sites blithely continued to allow U.S. players to play more than a month later (without their having any means of withdrawing). Finally both sites totally shut down -- not just to U.S. players, but the “ROW”-ers, too (rest of world) -- and as was the case with FTP no one was able to cash out a cent.

During the summer of 2012 PokerStars managed another deal with the DOJ, paying a big settlement that included acquiring Full Tilt Poker’s assets and making available outstanding FTP balances to U.S. players. Stars then reopened Full Tilt in November 2012 (outside the U.S., natch). Last year the two sites’ player pools were merged as one.

The reimbursement process was lengthy. I took part in it, finally getting my Full Tilt Poker funds in June 2014, more than three years after being shut out of the site.

(Incidentally, I’m convinced that by going through the withdrawal process which required me to submit bank account information to the DOJ in order to receive my funds, Fifth Third bank chose to close my account without warning and with zero explanation, very likely encouraged to do so by a DOJ initiative called “Operation Choke Point.”)

Anyhow, to get back to those rogue Cereus sites, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, up until last week it appeared as though anyone with funds on those two sites at the time they went offline were never going to see that money again. Suddenly, though, came an announcement that a process similar to the one by which Full Tilt Poker players were able to recover their funds had begun for those who had money in accounts when Absolute Poker and UltimateBet closed up their respective scam-sites.

Am glad for those affected, although truthfully I can’t say I’ve had a lot of empathy for them during their six-year-long plight. That’s because not only did I not have any money on either AP or UB, I’d withdrawn from both at the first whiff of the insider cheating scandal on one of them (Absolute) in October 2007.

For those coming to all of this well after the fact, you can search this blog for “Absolute Poker” or “UltimateBet” and find plenty. This post from February 2008 links to a lot of other articles about the Absolute scandal, while this one from May 2008 is an early one among many relating details of the even bigger scandal that erupted on UB.

Also, if all of this is only vaguely familiar to you or if you aren’t up at all on the story of “Black Friday” and its aftermath, I wrote an article a year ago for PokerNews describing a lot of it in detail: “Black Friday: Reliving Poker’s Darkest Day Five Years Later.”

Just prior to Black Friday, UltimateBet in particular had somehow crept its way back into the limelight by signing a lot of “team pros” some of whom did work to rehabilitate the site’s post-scandal image. As it soon turned out, whatever the spokespersons’ intentions might have been at the time, it was all incredibly damaging to the poker community and, truthfully, to the subsequently dim prospects for online poker in the U.S.

This news regarding Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and the unveiling of the website where claims can be made by players (through June 9, 2017) took many by surprise, and I noticed a couple of articles describing it having come from “out of nowhere.”

I also saw some attempts to connect the DOJ’s decision to start the process with Preet Bharara’s headline-grabbing dismissal along with a number of other U.S. Attorneys by the Trump administration last month. Bharara, for those who don’t know, was the one who brought the charges against the founders of the implicated sites (and others) that were unsealed on Black Friday. He was also the one who called Full Tilt Poker a “ponzi scheme.”

Truthfully, it seems more likely that the news is more directly connected to Absolute Poker founder Scott Tom -- one of those named in the indictment and civil complaint -- having finally returned to the U.S. in February to face the charges against him. (Tom pleaded not guilty.)

Whatever prompted it, I’m sure the players are glad about it. To me it’s all the faintest hint of a whisper of an echo of a story finally lumbering, zombie-like, toward a much-belated anticlimax. And like Robyn Hitchcock was saying, it feels a bit like reactivating the undead to write about it.

Robyn Hitchcock at the Grey Eagle

Took a nice, leisurely trip up to Asheville this past weekend with Vera Valmore, kind of a mini-vacation inspired by Robyn Hitchcock -- a longtime fave of mine -- having come to play a gig at the Grey Eagle on Saturday.

Hitchcock is someone I’ve been listening to for more than three decades, which means I started picking up his records not that long after he started making them. I wore out the Soft Boys albums, his solo LPs, and those he made fronting the Egyptians, picking up and studying just about everything right through the ’90s and after. And I have continued checking in on the more recent stuff as well, including his latest, The Man Upstairs, released a couple of summers ago.

I saw him play a couple of times way back when -- once during late ’80s, then another time around ’91 -- and in fact I even dragged Vera to the second of those shows. Since then he’s slowed down somewhat, having evolved from a loud, electrified rocker with psychedelic tendencies into a softer, acoustic-based act that strikes newcomers as a kind of weird neo-folk, although the inspired, surreal lyricism remains the most conspicuous common thread tying together the different eras.

Seeing him again kind of paralleled the experience I was describing last week when I located and listened to a boot of a Bruce Springsteen show I’d attended over thirty years ago. I say that because of the uncanny deja-voodoo I experienced as Hitchcock happened to play some of the same songs I’d heard him perform before all those years ago.

One I know he played at the earlier shows was the meditative “Raymond Chandler Evening,” a kind of homage to the hard-boiled writer filled with dark, gritty imagery that contrasts with the sweet arpeggios carrying its catchy melody. (Was delighted when he tossed in an extra verse I’d never heard before, introducing another crime scene into the proceedings.) He followed that Saturday with another one from the same 1986 album Element of Light -- “Bass” -- a song I’m also pretty sure he played when back when I last saw him.

Vera and I had to laugh when he began “Bass.” Earlier in the evening we’d enjoyed a very fun dinner with our poker-playing friends PokerGrump and CardGrrl, and Vera and I both happened to have ordered bass for our entrees. I joked then Hitchcock had a song by that name, though I doubted he’d play it... and then he did.

Someone’s already uploaded that particular track to YouTube, if you’re curious. In fact, I'm noticing other songs from the show on there, too, and have linked to each from the titles in this post. During one of Hitchcock’s many extemporaneous acts of word association used to introduce songs (a signature trait), he joked about skipping ahead in the YouTube video, fully conscious of the fact that many artists’ performances get instantly memorialized in this way.

Hitchcock actually split the bill with the comedian, Eugene Mirman. Hitchcock came on first, playing about 10 or 11 songs, with other highlights including “I'm Only You” and the Dylan cover “Not Dark Yet” with which he opened.

After that Mirman made us laugh for about 45 minutes, then the pair both carried on a suitably absurd conversation onstage for a while before Hitchcock closed the night with “My Wife and My Dead Wife” (another ’80s-era track I’d seen him play in the past). A great time, start to finish.

My only bit of chronicling during the show was to snap that poor-looking pic up above, one showing Hitchcock squinting out into the crowd in a fashion that seems to suit the photo’s lack of clarity. As I was telling PokerGrump and Cardgrrl after our dinner, I’ve lately found myself actively opposing the whole take-a-picture-of-everything urge that so often possesses us these days. (Not to mention the subsequent feeling of being obliged to broadcast those pictures via one’s preferred form of social media.)

I guess I archive plenty enough here on the blog, although that exercise is a little different. Here I force myself to translate experience into words, that act alone being enough to make whatever it is much more memorable than tends to happen when snapping a pic or shooting a short vid.

The whole weekend was like that, really, spent mostly unplugged -- like Hitchcock.

The (Unexpected) Return of the Prodigal Son

So I’m listening to yesterday’s episode of The Poker Beat (2/12/09), that new podcast over on PokerRoad hosted by Scott Huff in which he has on various poker media types to discuss news of the day. After a discussion of that Russ Hamilton video and its possible significance, Bluff Magazine Editor-in-Chief Matthew Parvis came on to talk about this new “Bluff Magazine Online Poker Challenge” announced earlier this month.

The Challenge sounds interesting enough. It looks like a great chance for the sponsoring site, Lock Poker, to get some publicity, although in the interview Parvis says it was his “brainchild.” As one can read about over on Bluff, the “competition will bring together some of the best online poker players and each will be given an opportunity to build a bankroll playing multi-table tournaments and sit-n-gos exclusively on Lock Poker.”

As Parvis explained on the show, “we are basically depositing $200 into a Lock Poker account” for each player invited to play in the Challenge. The accounts are apparently “locked” (pun intended?) so no other deposits or transfers can be made with them, and as the Challenge proceeds they will be audited each night “because we don’t want any scandal to be associated with the Challenge itself” (explained Parvis). The players will have 30 days to try to build their rolls, and the one who manages to earn the most will make the cover of an upcoming issue of Bluff. I believe all of this will happen in March.

“We were lucky enough to get some really quality guys,” noted Parvis on the show. He mentioned several, including the magazine’s 2008 online poker player of the year David “The Maven” Chicotsky, Adam Junglen, Matt Vingren, Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Søren Kongsgaard, “Bodog” Ari Engel, and Jeff “Yellowsub” Williams. “A really, really good line-up of quality guys,” said Parvis, adding that he was only listing some of the 20 players who had been invited.

The article over on Bluff mentions some of the others who have been invited, including Garrett “GBecks” Beckman, Phil “USCphildo” Collins, Brett “Bhanks11” Hanks, and Maria Ho. Sorel Mizzi is also listed, he of the “account selling” incident from December 2007 that caused him to be banned from Full Tilt Poker.

Parvis talked a bit about Mizzi on the show. He also talked more than a bit about one other controversial name appearing over there on the list of invitees: Josh “JJprodigy” Field. No shinola.

You remember Field, don’t you? First banned from PartyPoker back in February 2006 (when he was just 16) after he won their $500,000 Sunday Tournament in which he was playing under two screen names (JJProdigy and Ablackcar). He was then caught cheating at other sites, as well, from which he was also banned. PokerStars even banned him from playing in their PokerStars Caribbean Adventure once he turned 18.

It was right around the time he turned 18 that Field issued some “apologies” (of a sort) on forums and in interviews. I transcribed a bit of the PokerRoad interview (the 1/14/08 episode) in a post titled “Uncorrected Personality Traits That Seem Whimsical in a Child May Prove to Be Ugly in a Fully Grown Adult.”* Among other questions, Field was asked in the PokerRoad interview whether or not he was then “playing on the sites you’re banned from and you have no plans to play on [those] sites.”

“At this moment in time, yeah,” answered Field. “I can’t tell you in a month I’ll be thinking the same, because it’ll be really hard not playing all those sites. But right now, yeah.”

On The Poker Beat, Parvis said he’d spoken with Field at the recent Aussie Millions and afterwards felt he was worth inviting to participate in the Challenge, even though Parvis admitted Field had made some “serious, serious mistakes in his life in terms of the poker world and cheating, and multi-accounting, and ghosting, and selling accounts... whatever the scandals may be.” “That’s a hell of a laundry list,” joked Huff in response.

Well, now it appears Field will not be able to play in the Challenge after all. Parvis told Huff he received an email on Wednesday which reported “there was some situation” over on Cake Poker (for which Lock Poker is a skin, I believe) with an “account hand-off” involving Field. “Whatever the case is, it appears that JJ has been involved in another sticky situation here,” said Parvis, and so will not be allowed to play in the Challenge.

To Parvis’ credit, he expressed humility to Huff about having been fooled into thinking Field had indeed changed his cheating ways. Still, one has to wonder about the initial decision to invite the notorious JJProdigy to participate in such a Challenge. They don’t want “any scandal to be associated with the Challenge itself,” but then Bluff invites the most notorious, scandal-ridden player in online poker to participate?

As I was listening, I was amazed Field could even resurface in this way as part of any story -- much less one involving selecting top online pros to participate in a freeroll like this. As Seth Meyers would say over on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, “Really?!?”

Yet another head-scratching moment from the ethically-ambiguous world of online poker.

*By the way, that earlier post title came from Robyn Hitchcock’s twisted a cappella number “Uncorrected Personality Traits” that appears on one of my all-time favorite discs, Hitchcock’s 1984 masterpiece I Often Dream of Trains. And speaking of masterpieces, that’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by the Dutch master, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, pictured above.