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.

The DFS “Scandal” and Online Poker’s Past

Late last week I was following a few tweets and read a post on what appeared to be a yet-to-explode forum thread regarding this story about a DraftKings employee accidentally releasing ownership data for the Week 3 NFL games during the afternoon that Sunday, including ownership for games that hadn’t started yet.

The post appeared on the RotoGrinders site in a forum thread titled “DraftKings Ownership Leak.” Like I say, the thread didn’t seem to have gotten much attention, although if I remember correctly subsequent posts (which I don’t see today) made it seem like the thread might have been locked early.

The first response (that remains) was from someone at RotoGrinders saying he was talking to a person named Ethan at DK who was about to post a statement. The RotoGrinders guy defends Ethan and DraftKings. Then Ethan’s statement appears, and he explains how “I was the only person with this data and as a DK employee am not allowed to play on the site.” An innocuous-seeming, nothing-to-see-here-please-disperse kind of exchange.

This back-and-forth sat there quietly for a couple of days, but over weekend Twitter picked up the story in a big way, and by yesterday it had developed considerably with more details about the data leak as well as information about the employee Ethan Haskell’s successes on the rival FanDuel site, including a massive $350,000 win for finishing second in FD’s $5M NFL Sunday Million during Week 3. More on Haskell himself has been made more generally known as well, including his position at DK (Written Content Manager) and his previous experience as a content editor for a couple of years at RotoGrinders (perhaps explaining the RG guy’s defense of him in the thread).

It should be noted that there is no evidence that Haskell used any of the info he accidentally leaked to help him land the big prize in the FD contest (or in other games). In any event, the story has now ballooned into a larger discussion about daily fantasy sports, in particular about potential problems with game integrity.

Legal Sports Report has been a good site to follow for coverage of the many issues arising with this story as well as other DFS-related topics. This article from the weekend titled “DraftKings Lineup Leak Rocks Daily Fantasy Industry: Questions and Answers” provides details of the original story, a full explanation of why “insider” knowledge of DFS player ownership data ahead of time can provide a huge edge, and other issues having to do with the sites’ policies and current lack of regulation. The article also includes new statements from both DraftKings and FanDuel from Monday about their intentions to review their “internal controls” and policies.

The story has now moved into the mainstream as well, with even The New York Times reporting on it yesterday in “Scandal Erupts in Unregulated World of Fantasy Sports.” Thanks in large part to the highly conspicuous blitz of television advertising by both DFS and FD, the topic of daily fantasy sports is no longer interesting just to those who play but to others, too, who have been inundated so aggressively with all the ads.

Those of us who were involved with online poker when it first appeared and began to grow in popularity can’t help but notice several parallels seeming to emerge with regard to this story.

Like with DFS, online poker was around for a few years before suddenly catching fire. Planet Poker was the first online site to deal real money games, doing so on January 1, 1998. A little over five years later came the first episodes of the World Poker Tour, then Chris Moneymaker’s win at the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, and then the “boom,” generally speaking.

Last week I noted the anniversary of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that interestingly has had the dual significance of helping jettison online poker from the U.S. while introducing a means for what has now evolved into the DFS industry to be introduced. The first DFS site (Fantasy Sports Live) went live in June 2007, with that industry’s “boom” (as it were) also not occurring until several years later.

As online poker grew more popular, the potential for scandals began to grow as well with much discussion about possible industry-threatening problems on the horizon. Lots of stories about collusion, ghosting, multi-accounting, and other violations of sites’ terms and conditions were circulating, as were instances of player funds being lost with the boom-preceding PokerSpot controversy the biggest early example to occur.

Then on September 12, 2007 a player going by the username POTRIPPER won the $100K Guarantee on Absolute Poker after correctly calling an opponent’s final hand all-in with just ten-high. My first reaction -- chronicled in a post here a week-and-a-half later -- was to wonder about AP getting hacked somehow or perhaps there having been an “inside job.” As we would come to learn, the latter was indeed the case, something AP would initially try to cover up (thereby making the scandal worse). The story then quickly took off in a big way both within the poker world and in the mainstream (including an article in The New York Times).

The loser of that crazy ten-high hand versus POTRIPPER was poker pro Marco Johnson who emailed AP afterwards to request hand histories from the tournament. Johnson didn’t initially study the response, but after buzz about the hand and other possible shenanigans at AP had begun to build he went back to look at those hand histories again and discovered something remarkable. Not only were his hole cards listed, but so, too, were the hole cards of all the other players. The hand histories then became a “break in the case” helping prove POTRIPPER was able to see others’ hole cards and a first step in unraveling the “superuser” scandal.

The larger superuser scandal that would follow at AP sister site UltimateBet (a story that first broke in early 2008) would similarly start out focusing on a single player -- “NioNio” -- who won at an insanely high rate on UB right up until the week the AP scandal broke at which time the player suddenly disappeared from UB. (That scatter plot graph above created by Michael Josem famously illustrated NioNio’s dominance.) Other suspicious accounts were then identified, and the story and scandal got bigger and bigger from there, never being truly resolved (despite former UB part-owner and representative Phil Hellmuth’s revisionist claims to the contrary).

At least a few parallels can be seen here -- an accidental “leak” of information by a site suddenly opening the door to closer scrutiny and suggestions of wrongdoing, a focus on “insider” information allegedly helping an employee to win (in the DFS case by going onto a different site to play), and remarkably high win rates inspiring accusations of an imbalance in the playing field.

The unambiguous advantage of seeing others’ hole cards and the less obvious advantage of having access to ownership data before games close in DFS perhaps don’t seem analgous (to most of us). But those who understand DFS strategy and how the games work have persuasively put forward the parallel. Again, this issue isn’t unrelated to other ones affecting the game, including the huge knowledge gap between number-crunching DFS regs and everyone else, something that is also akin to what we’ve often talked about in online poker where third-party software and other aids have created a significant advantage for a segment of full-timers over those who don’t benefit from the information provided by such tools.

Online poker survived (and mostly continued to thrive) despite the AP and UB scandals, with the sites themselves even able to remain in operation until both collapsed post-Black Friday (resulting in another huge loss of players’ funds). There continued to be serious problems with game integrity thereafter, of course, and the Black Friday indictment and civil complaint would dramatically demonstrate even larger issues for the industry.

I’m actually not quite ready to join the torch-carrying crowd currently storming the gates of DFS. I will say, though, as someone already not hugely inspired to get involved with DFS, recent developments are hardly encouraging me to give it an earnest try.

That said, knowing how similar things unfolded and turned out with online poker, it will be curious to see where the faster-moving DFS “scandal” goes next.

Listening Back to Back in the Day

There’s a lot that’s interesting swirling around with regard to online poker and where it’s going these days. (Or not going, if you’re here in the U.S.)

But that’s standard -- that is, for there to be all sorts of stories, scoops, sensations, and scandals associated with the online version of the game. Has been the case ever since I started writing this blog more than eight-and-a-half years ago.

In fact today I took a break from reading the latest to look back a little at some of the issues being discussed not long after I started this sucker, thanks in part to my having randomly happened on a folder on an old computer full of poker podcasts.

The shows are all from late 2007 and early 2008, back when I remember having to download podcasts in order to hear them. That above is a crude screenshot of the folder -- if you’re curious you can click the pic to enlarge it. Looks like more than 40 different shows represented in the folder. Just by chance I decided to dial up one from exactly seven years ago today -- the 12/2/07 episode of “Big Poker Sundays” hosted by Scott Huff and Haralobos Voulgaris which aired on the now-defunct PokerRoad site.

The show covered various topics of the day, including a story about an infamous instance of “ghosting” involving the soon-to-be-let-go Managing Editor of BLUFF, Chris Vaughn, and Sorel Mizzi. Shane “shaniac” Schleger called in, too, to talk more about the state of online poker including current worries about multi-accounting, ghosting, and what was then a recent development regarding cheating on Absolute Poker. (I was even surprised to hear a quick reference to Hard-Boiled Poker in there, something I hadn’t remembered at all.)

Listening to the show sent me back to some articles online as well as some old posts here, including this post written the day after the BPS show that mentions some of what was discussed. Think I’ll probably next have to back up a few weeks with these and listen again to the first discussions of the Absolute Poker cheating scandal as it was just starting to break.

Speaking of, during my clicking around through some old HBP posts I landed on this one from February 2008 compiling lots of early articles about AP. Talk about a rabbit hole.

I’ll spare you all the little twists and turns I’ve been clicking my way through tonight, though will say I had a chuckle over this article (from mid-September ’07) from someone expressing utter disbelief that any cheating could have happened on the site, as well as this follow-up (written a week later) adamantly confirming that position, then adding the following:

“I've also spoken with an anonymous source who has had contact with individuals at Ultimate Bet and a few other sites, who notes that no such super user exists on those sites, either. Why, then, would Absolute Poker be the lone site that finds a need to create a super user?”

Remembering Rivers Duking It Out With Duke

I’m a big fan of old recorded comedy, having spent many years fishing LPs out of the used bins to build a big but not too embarrassingly large of a collection. And of course now that practically everything exists online to be hunted down if one desires, I’ve filled a lot of gaps when it comes to those old records and radio shows, in particular from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Both Robin Williams and Joan Rivers were significant figures during that era of comedy, and of course both became even more central in popular culture during the decades since. Both recorded a few LPs, though none of them found their way into my collection. Still, I appreciated how both contributed importantly to American comedy.

When news of Rivers having passed began circulating yesterday afternoon, many in poker immediately recalled her venomous tête-à-tête with Annie Duke on Celebrity Apprentice from five years ago. I found myself looking back at a post I’d written here the day after the finale of that quasi-competition.

For Rivers the show existed amid what became an extended final run of heightened fame marked by her appearance on several reality shows, “red carpet” hosting gigs, and the E! network show Fashion Police that helped keep her a household name.

For Duke being on Celebrity Apprentice was the most notable of several television-related ventures that included turning up on other game shows and a couple of failed attempts starting shows centered around her own then-growing celebrity such as Annie Duke Takes on the World (a game show in which she played poker against amateurs) and All In (a sitcom based on her life -- no shinola).

At the time Duke was still representing UltimateBet (or UB) well after the site’s massive insider cheating scandal had become public. Indeed, she’d been spending much of the previous year defending the site, repeatedly claiming the site had shown “grace and integrity” in its handling of the matter when even then it was clear that was hardly the case, and of course later on further corruption within UB became even more evident. (She’d part with the site at the very end of 2010, three-and-a-half months before Black Friday.)

In other words, some of the poker community was already uncertain about Duke’s status as a “spokesperson” of poker even then in the spring of 2009, although on Celebrity Apprentice she was absolutely regarded that way by others on the show and by the mainstream audience. Indeed, when it came to the Rivers-vs.-Duke rivalry on the show, it was Duke’s poker player identity that earned the most remembered bit of vitriol from the comedian, at least among those of us in poker -- even more remembered than Rivers calling Duke a “Nazi” and comparing her to Hitler.

From that 2009 post:

“Even if you haven’t been watching the show, you’d probably heard about Rivers’ shots at poker and Vegas. How she referred to the money contributed by poker players to Duke’s cause as ‘money with blood on it.’ How she referred to her many years performing in LV by saying ‘I’ve met your people in Vegas for forty years -- none of them have last names,’ suggesting the nefarious and/or criminal backgrounds of the inhabitants of Sin City...”

“You’re a poker player... a poker player,” Rivers continues in the clip we all passed around at the time. “That’s beyond white trash.” “Poker players are the most awesome people in the world,” Duke responds, not necessarily her finest moment as a debater. “Poker players are trash, darling... trash,” reiterates Rivers.

Duke’s subsequent move from UB to the doomed Epic Poker League didn’t do much to prove Rivers wrong, either, when it came to her judgment of Duke. Speaking of, Jeffrey Pollack -- whose reputation in the poker world would sink in the EPL ship along with Duke’s -- was still the WSOP Commissioner at the time of Duke’s appearance on Celebrity Apprentice, and in the WSOP conference call that year would maintain that Duke’s appearance on the show represented a “leap forward for the mainstreaming of poker into our pop culture” and that the “net effect was going to be very good for poker.”

I’m wondering otherwise in that post, given how badly the game was portrayed on the show. And of course, years later, even poker players are today unhesitatingly siding in retrospect with Rivers against Duke.

For Rivers, Annie Duke was just one of several with whom she battled heads-up in a long career, her unrestrained comedic style (and personality) often being much more savage than subtle (or more Juvenal than Horace). And while poker and its image might have suffered some collateral damage from their exchange years ago, the game would persevere nonetheless -- despite both of them.

Looking Back at the OP on UB

Yesterday I listened to episode 7 of the poker podcast Life With Face Cards, featuring an interview with poker player David Paredes.

I hadn’t heard the show before -- it just debuted in April -- but I enjoyed listening, with the host David Podgurski giving his guest lots of room to discuss in detail various topics while also keeping the interview moving forward. (I hope I’m spelling Podgurski’s name correctly.) Past guests have included Dan Cates, Jay Rosenkrantz, and Dani Stern.

It helped that Paredes proved an interesting guest. I remember first covering Paredes in a tournament back in early 2010 when he final tabled the NAPT Main Event at the Venetian, finishing fifth. I’ve seen him now and then at other tourneys since, I believe most recently at the one at the Sands Bethlehem last winter.

The show reminds us all that Paredes was in fact right in the middle of things way back in January 2008 when the initial discoveries regarding cheating on Ultimate Bet first surfaced.

It was during the fall of the previous year that Paredes, a.k.a. “dplnyc21” on Two Plus Two, had compared notes with Mike “trambopoline” Fosco regarding some unusual losses both had experienced on UB when playing against the player “NioNio” from July-Sept. 2007. They noted both the player’s insanely high win rate -- more than 60BB/100 hands -- and the fact that the player was playing more than 65% of hands (well over twice that of a typical, successful NLHE player).

Using PokerTracker, the pair were able to identify other unusual patterns in the relatively small sample size of 3,000 hands or so, and decided to take their findings and concerns to the High Stakes PL/NL forum on Two Plus Two.

A little after midnight on January 8, 2008, Fosco started a thread with the title “Suspected super user on UB: NioNio” with a long post starting with a brief summary of NioNio’s unusual stats followed by about 25 hand histories.

We now know this was just the beginning, with the NioNio account being one of dozens employed by the many who used the so-called “AuditMonster” program to cheat opponents on the site. Many more threads would appear after this one, as would a more careful marshaling of evidence by numerous others to compile a more substantial (and convincing) case regarding the cheating.

It was exactly two months later on March 8, 2008 that Ultimate Bet issued its “Interim Statement” acknowledging that a cheating “scheme” had been perpetrated on the site. Of course, the recent revelation of that audio recording secretly made by primary cheater Russ Hamilton of a meeting involving himself, Greg Pierson, Dan Friedberg, and Sandy Millar, we now know definitively that the statement and other machinations by Ultimate Bet going forward were part of a new scheme to cover up as much as possible so as to minimize player refunds and enable the site to continue operating. (That first three-hour recording came a few weeks after the first 2+2 thread appeared; the second two-hour recording was from July 2008.)

And with the benefit of hindsight we also know the latter scheme in fact worked, with the subsequent signing of more sponsored pros including Joe Sebok, the continued support of spokespersons Annie Duke (until a few days ago an aggressive champion of UB, old and new) and Phil Hellmuth (a.k.a. “Completely Oblivious”). The site stumbled for a while, but recovered and in fact thrived right up until April 2011 and Black Friday, with its Full Tilt Poker-like failure to segregate player funds resulting in the loss of about $55 million worth of funds by those who continued to play on the site.

Speaking of hindsight, reading through that original “Suspected super user on UB: NioNio” thread is kind of fascinating. It begins and ends on 1/8/08, and I think might have actually been locked or even temporarily deleted amid criticisms that the accusations presented by trambopoline and dplnyc21 were without merit.

It’s interesting to see the overwhelmingly negative response to the pair’s findings. A few chimed in to agree that they, too, had played with NioNio and were suspicious, with others also saying that Fosco’s findings provided reasonable cause for suspicion and warranted further investigation. But most of those posting express serious doubts in response to the OP.

Isaac “Ike” Haxton is the most skeptical of that latter group, saying he “bet this guy is just a lucky fish” and that from what had been presented “there is no evidence this guy is anything other than a lucksack.” After speculating further regarding some of the hands that were posted, Haxton even goes on to say “you could make a much stronger case that i'm a superuser.”

(Haxton, incidentally, would go on to build a $300K bankroll on the “new UB” and Absolute only to see that money evaporate on Black Friday. I know he was trying to sell those funds off at 20 cents on the dollar about six weeks later, but I’m not sure what came of that.)

To be fair, the small sample size and selection of hands presented wasn’t nearly enough to build a convincing case, thus it is completely understandable to see posters on that day regarding the idea as belonging to the large category of “online-poker-is-rigged” arguments instinctively made by players following losing sessions or a preponderance of bad beats.

That is to say, I’m not suggesting any sort of criticism regarding those who initially doubted Paredes and Fosco -- after all, if we think back, they were voicing what was really a majority view at the time.

It is amazing, really, to think about the climate of trust in which online poker operated during those years. Trust which we now know was in several cases misplaced, but then had little or no hesitation to give.

The great majority were convinced the games had to be on the up-and-up, even after the Absolute Poker scandal had surfaced in the fall of 2007. And no site would ever be so kill-the-golden-goose reckless as to cheat its own customers, right?

Ambient Noise

“Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.” --Major T.J. “King” Kong, Dr. Strangelove

I’ll admit that while I’ve been busy with other things this week, I’ve continued to linger some over that Travis Makar info dump from last Friday regarding the UltimateBet insider cheating scandal, in particular those two lengthy audio files chronicling two meetings involving Russ Hamilton, Dan Friedberg, Sandy Millar, and (on one of them) Greg Pierson.

Been snooping through the files some more, reading various articles and postings, as well as listening to still more audio regarding it all in the form of podcasts.

The most recent episode of the Two Plus Two Pokercast with Haralabos Voulgaris provided some interesting discussion, with Voulgaris providing some interesting tidbits from his experience with UB and some of its principals. However, the lengthy guest spot of Scott “ElevenGrover” Bell mostly had the effect of confusing rather than clarifying (for me, anyway).

I better liked Todd Witteles’s partial breakdown of the recordings on his Poker Fraud Alert show this week. “DanDruff” played clips (mostly from the first part of the first recording) while commenting along the way, which seemed a more constructive exercise.

Finally I heard Witteles’s ex-cohort Bryan Micon’s latest Donk Down show on which appeared both Pokerati’s Dan Michalski and the man in the middle himself, Travis Makar. A mostly maddening hour-and-a-half, I’m afraid, with neither of the hosts having listened to the audio and even Makar saying he wasn’t completely up on what the recordings contained.

Makar expressed a willingness to answer any questions from Micon and Michalski, but neither seemed able to come up with any and thus the show failed to add much of value at all other than to remind us that Makar has still more information (and audio) which may or may not be revealed at a later date.

All of which is to say, the actual significance of the recorded discussions as well as all of the other newly-publicized data obviously remain in need of cogent explanation. And probably will for a good while, I imagine.

I mentioned on Monday how the recordings uncannily recall the Watergate tapes, what with the secretive nature of the recordings being made and the discussants’ talk of covering up previous scandalous behavior while making decisions that will subsequently affect the lives of many others. The ambient noise and interruptions occasionally obfuscating certain exchanges adds further to the similarity.

Every now and then I’ll dig around and listen to those tapes Richard Nixon had made, part of my hobby-like fascination with reading and learning more about the complicated figure. Of course, I almost never do so without also looking a transcript and usually having some sort of additional annotation to help guide me regarding who is saying what and what it all ultimately means.

Given the historical importance of those recordings and the fact that they were made so long ago, it’s easy to locate various aids to understanding that can help make the experience of listening all the more worthwhile. Not to mention even more compelling. (By the way, if you’re curious about the Nixon recordings, the “Nixon Tapes” website is a good place to start.)

* * * * *

Speaking of private meetings conducted during times of crisis, I wrote a new “Pop Poker” column for PokerListings regarding Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the 1964 darkly-comic satire directed by Stanley Kubrick that is mostly taken up with a U.S. president and his advisors meeting in a “War Room” to discuss and try to deal with the surprise launch of a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by a deranged general.

The film actually has a couple of significant connections to poker, including the character of Dr. Strangelove (one of three played by Peter Sellars) being partly based on John von Neumann, the Austrian-born mathematician often credited with having written and co-written the works that helped inaugurate the study of modern game theory. Von Neumann wrote about poker in those seminal works, and during the Cold War especially game theory played a particular role when it came to decision-making regarding nuclear weapons.

In fact, as I note at the end of the piece, in Dr. Strangelove the War Room itself features a large circular table around which the president and his advisor sit that was deliberately meant to look like a poker table.

Check out the article, if you’re curious to read more.

More UB Sh!t

I have been away for the last few days, attending a dressage competition with Vera. I’ve mentioned before how Vera competes, and I enjoy getting the chance sometimes to accompany her on these trips to provide support for her.

One of the ways I usually end up helping out at these shows involves handling various jobs associated with the maintenance of Vera’s horse. In other words, having long ago agreed to be her groom, I continue today as a different kind of groom for her.

I’m not a rider myself, but I am qualified for several of these highly necessary tasks, including the important one of periodically keeping the stall clean. That’s right. I’m talking about being able to use a long-handled tool especially designed for digging and shoveling.

And no, I’m not talking about shinola.

Anyhow, being away from home as I was, I was only intermittently “on the grid” for the last several days. However, I was sufficiently connected to become aware on Friday night that Russ Hamilton’s former assistant and would-be fall guy Travis Makar had suddenly made available a host of new information regarding the extensive and widespread insider cheating scandal and subsequent cover-up at Ultimate Bet.

I’m sure you know all about this release of information, too, including its highlight -- two audio recordings of meetings secretly made by Hamilton himself revealing details of both the cheating and the early stages of the cover-up. The recordings have been known by many to exist for quite a while, actually, but their having been made public now finally gives everyone a chance to listen and learn a lot more about how deep the scandal went and how devious Hamilton and others were.

As I say, I was occupied for much of the weekend, unable to sit in my usual workspace in order to listen, read what others were saying, formulate thoughts and take notes, and write. But I was able to hear the entire five hours’ worth of meetings on my iPhone as I went about my work around the barn.

Having only listened through once, I’m not ready today to offer any sort of comprehensive response to what appears on the recordings. I imagine I will eventually find the time and energy, however, to add another post (or posts) to the pile being created by others as well as the one I have built here at Hard-Boiled Poker over the years.

We all knew Hamilton was an immoral ogre, but on the recordings he seems positively inhuman. Others on the recordings (UB founder Greg Pierson, attorney Daniel Friedberg, attorney Sandy Millar), while being badgered about by Hamilton, seem nearly as repulsive.

I will say I thought more than once while listening about the Watergate tapes, which as someone with a special interest in Nixon I’ve listened to quite a bit over the years. The ambience and whole “we gotta contain this” purpose of the discussions almost uncannily recalls the experience of listening to those tapes, too.

Such a mood is firmly established at the beginning of the first-released recording:

Hamilton: “So, Dan… where are we at here?”
Friedberg: “Well, Greg said this thing is spiraling.”
Hamilton: “Say that again?”
Friedberg: “This thing is spiraling.”

I also had another thought as I listened, connecting the entire, complicated saga with what I was doing at the time. And yes, that thought was partly inspired by the sound of Hamilton visiting the restroom after the meeting concluded on the first-released recording, sounding as though he was (with great difficulty) emptying his bowels -- a hilarious coda seemed to literalize the overriding metaphor of the meeting that preceded it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever cleaned out a horse’s stall before or not, but if you have, you know that while the first part of the job is easy enough, near the end you often find that no matter how many times you think you are completely finished, if you move some shavings or hay around a little you’ll discover -- always, it seems -- still one more little imperfect, stubborn globule in need of being removed.

You push stuff around and dig and dig, and dammit there’s more there. Finally you just give up and stop digging, because otherwise it never ends.

Just like with UltimateBet.

Poker Miscellanies

Kind of a down time, poker-wise, these days. Sure EPT Berlin is happening, plus other tourneys around the globe (as always). Still, it feels more like the poker world is in resting up mode at the moment. Some are readying for the Spring Championship of Online Poker on PokerStars in May, while most are already planning for the World Series of Poker which is now just a little over a month away.

Of course, here in the U.S. a lot of us have been in what might be called “resting up” mode for a long time now. Or perhaps more appropriately, “wait and see.” Looking forward to the second part of the year when some of the Nevada sites start going live (for real), and perhaps even something starts to happen in New Jersey, too, before the year is out.

The items coming over the news ticker this week are arriving a little more slowly than usual, although there were a couple of odds and ends that caught my eye over the last few days.

That story out of Los Angeles about Joe Sebok, nude photos, email hacking, and an extortion attempt was kinda-sorta surprising to see. You probably heard about that one. Coupla dudes had already pleaded guilty to trying to extort Sebok and on Monday were back in a U.S. District Court to be sentenced for their crimes.

Sebok offered testimony to explain how the extortion attempt affected him, including negatively impacting his ability to work in poker. “I was no longer able to maintain my then-current level of participation in the poker industry, representing the brands that I had been previously, as well as greatly destroying my ability to do so with new companies moving forward,” Sebok told the judge.

The attempted scheme began in November 2010. Of course, by mid-April 2011 other factors arose quite suddenly also to negatively affect Sebok’s ability to represent the brands he had been previously. And by having associated with those brands, he had already more or less destroyed his ability to work with new companies in the poker industry moving forward.

There was another item from yesterday that I couldn’t help but click through to read about, a so-called “poker card murder” in China. At first I thought of that CSI episode from a couple of months ago, the poker-themed one I wrote about both here and over on PokerListings in which an actual playing card really is used as a murder weapon. I also thought of that “Killer Cards” story I’d read about not too long ago and shared here, the one involving a prisoner making a pipe bomb out of playing cards.

But reading this story, it appears the connection between poker and murder was entirely incidental. Rather the murderer had sealed up his victim in a carton box into which a few playing cards had accidentally fallen, thus igniting lots of misplaced speculation regarding the possible significance of the cards -- which, in fact, had nothing at all to do with the crime.

Even so, the story was kind of interesting insofar as it illustrated the deepy-rooted symbolic value of playing cards that transcends many cultures.

Finally, I’ll share one other, much lighter item, a National Public Radio segment in which actor, comedian, children’s book author, and hilarious Tweeter Michael Ian Black appeared with poker player Matt Matros on the show “Ask Me Another.”

The show is one of those live quiz shows performed in front of a live audience. Black and Matros were pitted against one another in a trivia game in which all of the questions were about poker. Black appeared multiple times on the old Celebrity Poker Showdown show, winning a couple of times, which I suppose partly explains how he ended up talking poker on the show.

As fans of both guys -- I wrote about Matros here once last summer -- I enjoyed the segment, which concluded with a Jonathan Coulton performance of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.”

Duke on Decisions

Yesterday a reporter named Sonja Sherwood who writes for the Philadelphia Business Journal published a piece describing her experience attending a 40-minute talk given by Annie Duke at World Cafe Live sometime last week. Sherwood’s report is titled “What Annie Duke can teach you about decisions.”

I know... the sort of headline that is practically impossible for anyone involved in poker over the last several years to read without an exaggerated eyeroll, followed thereafter by a quick click to move on without reading further.

Hooked me, though, and so I kept going.

It’s an earnest report from Sherwood, aside from her occasionally tipping her hand regarding what seems like gushing fandom of Duke. She explains early on how the theme of Duke’s PowerPoint presentation was to explore the reasons “why most people -- gamblers, brand marketers, business owners and employees -- fail to learn from bad decisions, and how companies can counteract that.”

We learn in the article that over the last year Duke has “put poker on the back burner” in favor of such speaking engagements. The audience for this one was about 65 professionals, most of whom Sherwood pegs as venture capitalists or techies.

It’s a curiously pitched piece, actually. Sherwood shows she has knowledge of Duke’s educational background and career as a player, at least up through 2004 when she won a WSOP bracelet while also earning that $2 million score in the invitation-only, 10-player WSOP Tournament of Champions. But if she has any awareness of UltimateBet/UB or the Epic Poker League -- the contexts for some truly poor decision-making by her subject over the last decade -- she doesn’t let on.

Sherwood shares some of the persuasive analogies between business and poker included in Duke’s talk, such as the way people often believe their successes come primarily from skill and failures the result of luck. Duke also passes along the very practical advice that “you have to be willing to admit the possibility that you’re a bad decision maker, but that’s very painful.”

It’s impossible to read such ideas and not think about the myriad bad decisions made in association with the EPL debacle, or about Duke’s involvement with UltimateBet/UB all of the way through its scandals and up until the very end of 2011 -- i.e., the very precipice of the site’s final, Black Friday-hastened implosion.

Duke mentions some companies encouraging employees to address publicly the process of decision-making by having actually “created a prize for the stupidest idea or biggest failure of the month.” An interesting idea, although again one wonders if Federated Sports + Gaming (the EPL’s parent company) had such a contest -- and to think that if they did, how incredibly competitive it must have been!

To Duke’s credit, following the talk she did share with Sherwood a little bit about her own missteps with regard to Epic. “I had a business go into chapter 11 last year,” she tells Sherwood. “I think I made pretty good decisions along the way, but when I look back I realize, oh, I should have seen this and I should have seen that and I was overconfident here, and I really believed in my own idea too much in this place....”

Is Duke following her own advice? Is she admitting the possibility that she was a bad decision maker? Perhaps, in the most delicate way possible. I can’t help but think of the interviewee who upon being asked to name a greatest weakness can only answer “I work too hard.”

Sherwood says “that seemed like a good place to end our conversation,” articulating exactly the opposite thought that most of us from the poker world would have when reading the article. Indeed, for a good number of us that seemed like a good place to start the conversation.

It’s sort of interesting to step back and think of Duke’s new career as a public speaker and how it perhaps can be understood as an extension of a career in poker.

In 2005 Duke published an autobiography titled How I Raised, Folded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed, and Won Millions at the World Series of Poker. (In fact, reading Sherwood’s piece again, it almost feels like consulting that book represents the extent of the author’s research into her subject.) Duke is no longer raising and folding, but I suppose one might say she is bluffing her way to more modest sums at the moment. Maybe flirting, too, some, I guess.

Like I say, ironies abound here. I’m tempted to end with a snarky one-liner about people attending a talk about learning from one’s mistakes coming away having decided not to attend such talks again. But to do so would ignore another irony.

After all, I just read an article titled “What Annie Duke can teach you about decisions.”

Someone Figured Out Two Plus Two

Like most of you, I’ve noticed the popular Two Plus Two forums went offline yesterday afternoon, having fallen victim to a hacker who “has displayed the ability to access e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords” as well as “the ability to decrypt passwords” (to quote from 2+2’s statement on the matter).

The site was taken offline as a precaution, with 2+2 advising users that if they happened to use their password for the forums for other accounts, they should change them as the hacker potentially has that info. NoahSD published a helpful post on his blog yesterday afternoon discussing the situation and providing advice.

The forums have been down for over 24 hours now, which means just about everybody who frequents them has become aware. The situation reminds me of that little brouhaha that erupted just about a year ago -- in late March, just before Black Friday -- which inspired a lot of talk about 2+2’s true significance to the poker community.

At issue was the revelation of still more questionable information regarding the insider cheating scandal (and subsequent cover-up) at UltimateBet. You might recall how during the first weeks of 2011, Joe Sebok -- at the time still a sponsored pro as well as UB Media and Operations Consultant -- was stirring things up a bit with interviews as well as some wars over Twitter. Coupled with some other new revelations about UB, the clamoring for answers was starting to become louder, with some wanting in particular to hear what UB’s COO Paul Leggett had to say about it all.

That’s when 2+2 “Grand Poobah” Mason Malmuth suggested in a thread that if Leggett were to come forward to address any questions, “He should answer them here,” since “2+2 is where the poker community is.”

That suggestion of 2+2’s centrality to the poker community -- or, perhaps even that 2+2 was “the poker community” -- got a lot of response, including many pointing out that the poker community includes a lot of people who have little or nothing to do with the forums, among other rejoinders.

I wrote a post here at the time in which I noted that in poker we really have multiple, overlapping communities (plural). I also got a little abstract and talked about how the whole idea of “community” in sometimes hard to imagine in poker given how the game necessarily pits us all against one other.

I suppose the longer 2+2 stays offline, the more its significance within the poker community will be clarified to us. It isn’t hard to imagine us all congregating somewhere else to share news, spread rumors, discuss strategy, insult and troll, earn warnings and bans, and imagine different scenarios in which Phil Hellmuth would ride a giant hot dog on water.

Then again, since Black Friday a lot of us have been wandering around somewhat detached from “the” poker community for many months now. Could make it that harder to get back together....

I expect 2+2 will be back soon enough, though. Which is good, ’cause I don’t have time to keep making my own photoshops.

In Which I Nearly Get Run Over on Memory Lane

In his weekly updates regarding our football pool, our friend Dr. Pauly has started referring to me as “the absent-minded professor.” He doesn’t know it, but by alluding to the 1961 Disney film in which Double Indemnity star Fred MacMurray took a turn as the flubber-inventing title character, Pauly is in fact highlighting what is essentially my biggest fear in the pool -- to forget to submit my picks.

I’m actually quite organized, hardly the absent-minded type, although this week hasn’t been the greatest for me. I could blame it on the end of the semester -- always a very distracting time for teachers -- but now that I’m teaching just a single class that really isn’t much of an excuse.

There have been a couple of uncharacteristic slip-ups this week, I’m sorry to report. Small memory lapses serving to remind that perfection eludes us all. The most comical of these by far happened last night. Indeed, it was almost as slapsticky as some of the scenes in The Absent-Minded Professor.

Vera Valmore and I own a big Ford diesel truck which she sometimes uses to pull horse trailers. Not long ago I we were shuttling vehicles back and forth from the barn to our house and the truck wound up at home rather than the barn where it normally sits parked. So last night while Vera was at the barn riding I drove the truck out with the plan to leave it there, and she would drive us both back.

I had to transfer some stuff from another car to the truck while also remembering to take Vera her extra truck key and a few other items from the house. To summarize, there were a handful of things I needed to keep in mind in preparing for the trip, and somehow I managed to remember them all.

Except one, that is.

In transferring items to and from vehicles I occasionally set a few on the hood of the truck rather than on the seat. In retrospect, that was not a recommended choice.

I initially drove out, got halfway down the road heading toward the interstate, then realized I’d left the key for Vera on the counter. Drove back, secured the key, then left again, traveling about a mile or so to the interstate.

I had just gotten onto the ramp downward to the highway when I noticed an item flying off the hood of the truck. My wallet! Don’t ask me why I had thought it needful to set my wallet there during all of my fiddling, because I have no idea myself. Incredibly it had remained put during that initial extra trip around the block as well as the mile that led up to my picking up speed to merge onto the interstate.

Luckily there was some shoulder available on the side of the ramp, and I pulled over quickly and got out. It was just about dusk, but there was still enough light for me to see my wallet sitting in the middle of the road a few dozen yards back. Cars were driving over it, and I had to wait for them to pass before dashing out into the road to retrieve the sucker.

I picked it up to see all of the cards had fallen out -- credit and debit cards, library cards, my health insurance card, my voting registration card, all of it. Even my Total Rewards card, haha. I looked around to see a few scattered on the pavement, and a few more among the fallen leaves that lined each side of the road.

The next ten minutes were spent dashing up and down and back and forth, grabbing cards and dodging cars, trying desperately to keep my head clear and not succumb entirely to the absurdity of the situation. It was getting darker, and fast. I had recovered what seemed like all of my cards except one. Unfortunately it was a debit card, one of the few among the bunch I really didn’t want to leave lying somewhere on the road.

Finally I saw what looked like my debit card sitting among some leaves. But it was only an empty cigarette pack. Then I thought I saw it back in the road, but that was just my similarly-colored savings card from the grocery store.

At last I spotted the debit card back up the road where the wallet had first taken flight. I waited for a couple more cars to pass, ran out and grabbed it, jogged back down to the truck, and hopped back into the driver’s seat.

As I drove I thought briefly of that “data leak” of information regarding UltimateBet customers from last week (discussed here). If I hadn’t managed to recover all of my cards, I could’ve replaced them, sure. But I’d have still worried vaguely about some of my personal information getting literally spilled about.

Anyhow, everything seems to be back where it belongs today. As far as I can remember, anyway.

Meanwhile, I think I might just go ahead and make my Sunday NFL picks right now.

UB Data Leak

At some point within the last couple of weeks, a large amount of information concerning player accounts on UltimateBet was made available on the web. The information was contained in a number of Excel and text files -- like 150 or so -- and could be downloaded by anyone in possession of the URL.

The files are all dated around the middle of last month. Late last week someone posted a link to the page on the Two Plus Two forums, then deleted the post just a few minutes later. However, a small number of people -- including the moderators at 2+2 -- were able to obtain the URL and get a look at what the files contain.

One of those mods, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, reported the leak on Subject:Poker early Friday evening. Haley Hintze got a look at the files and posted about them on her blog on Saturday afternoon. And Todd “Dandruff” Witteles (formerly of NeverWinPoker / DonkDown) also saw the files and shared an analysis on his new site.

The page linking to the files was taken down late Saturday, was back up again briefly early this morning, and is now down again. If you’re curious about what information is contained in the files, take a look at those three linked-to articles mentioned above. While there is certainly information most of us wouldn’t want spread around too liberally -- e.g., date of birth, mailing address, email address, phone number -- there doesn’t appear to be any specifics such as bank info, social security numbers, or the like contained in the files.

There’s some mystery about who is responsible for the leak (a rogue customer service employee?) as well as the possible reasons for the data having been sorted and assembled in this way (to sell to spammers?).

As Haley points out in her post, while some alarm is being expressed about this leak (e.g., in a new Two Plus Two thread started in response to the S:P article), it is not as though information provided to online poker sites hasn’t already been shared or sold or otherwise “leaked” around many times over. As Haley explains, “Most players are just commodities to the online sites. That’s the real why and how of it. Your data is secure as long as the site rakes in money, but once the squeeze comes, all bets are off, and anything that can be grabbed and sold is usually fair game.”

As I’ve written about here before, I had accounts on both Absolute Poker and UltimateBet.

I opened my AP account in October 2006, just a few days after the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was signed into law. It was right about that time that the company that owned AP bought out the company that owned UB. Talk then suggested the player bases would be consolidated, but instead AP and UB continued to operate independently. (It was not until July 2008 that the two sites would start touting themselves as the “Cereus network.”)

Then in August 2007, AP and UB offered to allow players to move funds back and forth between accounts on both sites. In early September 2007, I decided to do just that and moved some money from my AP account over into a new one on UB.

Within weeks the insider cheating scandal at Absolute Poker became public, and I immediately decided to withdraw all of my funds from both AP and UB. Getting my money out of AP was simple enough, but I had a hell of a time getting my measly roll off of UB. I finally did get my funds, but not after enduring a lot of frustration and absurdity first, details of which I shared in a post titled “UB Kidding Me.”

Shortly thereafter I began posting fairly frequently about the Absolute Poker scandal while also suggesting neither AP nor UB were sites to be trusted. Then in early March 2008 the UltimateBet scandal first hit the fan in a big way.

Thus I had an active AP account for a little over a year, and one on UB for just a couple of months. Just as with other online poker sites, I never gave either AP or UB any information I wasn’t comfortable sharing (e.g., I never gave credit card numbers, bank account numbers, my SSN, etc.).

Since Black Friday, the Full Tilt Poker fiasco has mostly eclipsed the equally-bad-for-poker mess that was/is AP/UB. Whereas the two Cereus networks had previously been the standard for dishonesty and fraud in online poker, FTP has swiftly evolved into the industry’s current benchmark for the-worst-it-can-get.

Thus while a few are anxious about it, the general outcry at the UB customer info leak has seemed mostly muted. I agree that it isn’t as though we should be all that surprised at the news that online poker sites have sold our information if there were a buck to made from it. But I do think this latest development should be remembered and included in the long list of ways UB managed to screw over its players. And the game.

Does kind of recall late 2007-early 2008 writing about this, though. Back when cheating and scandal in online poker was still relatively new. And for many, still something that seemed like it could be dismissed.

Amazing Grace?

There are so many jawdropping twists and turns in this Absolute Poker/UltimateBet (or “UB”) story, nothing surprises us anymore. Not really.

I’m remembering just a little over a week ago, just after Haley Hintze shared with us that eyebrow-raising email exchange between UB COO Paul Leggett and Olman Rimola, operational head of the Costa Rica IDS office, sending out a koan-like tweet in response:

“Amazed at UB/AP's infinite capacity to amaze. #headasplode”

Was primarily intending to communicate there that even after everything else -- the cheating, the cover-ups, the relentlessly ironic PR machinations (not to mention a plane transporting millions of dollars crashing, the sex scandal, federal raids, and other international intrigues) -- it was a little surprising to discover yet another episode could successfully evoke a reaction, both in myself and in others. Hard not to feel a little sheepish after being amazed again and again and again by these guys.

We’ve now heard AP/UB has finally reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice concerning the return of funds to U.S. players. Both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker had done so previously, although the nature of their agreements differed in a few particulars, including that the PS & FTP ones included the return of domains (which the AP/UB agreement does not).

As far as cashing out goes, I’m in the same situation I imagine most of you are. I’ve successfully cashed out from PokerStars, having received my funds. (I requested a paper check, which came this week and which I was able to deposit without worry.) I’m still waiting like everyone else regarding Full Tilt Poker. Meanwhile, I haven’t done any business with Absolute Poker or UB since late 2007, but continue to follow the increasingly panicky exchanges among those who have.

By the way, for some good explanation and analysis of the various issues in play regarding player cashouts and the three sites, see Grange95’s lengthy breakdown, “Regulation, Segregation, and a 
Cereus Case of Déjà Vu.” Bill Rini’s post titled “Player Account Segregation Explained” provides further insight as well into what he thinks is going on with regard to Full Tilt Poker and AP/UB.

In any event, the agreement between AP/UB and the U.S. Attorney’s Office is similar to the previous ones with Stars and Tilt in that it explicitly requires that the sites “will not allow for, facilitate, or provide the ability for players located in the United States to engage in playing online poker for ‘real money’ or any other thing of value.”

The AP/UB agreement is dated May 4th, yet U.S. players continue to play in real money games on both sites as late as today (Friday, May 13th). There’s a provision regarding monitoring for compliance with the agreement’s terms -- put simply, AP/UB is charged with hiring a “Monitor” (who must be independent and meet with the feds’ approval) who will submit Compliance Reports to the DOJ. The first report is due within 45 days of the “Monitor” being retained, although it is unclear when the deadline is for that to happen (it must be by “a date solely within the discretion of” the U.S. Attorney’s office).

If "a Compliance Report identifies a defect” in AP/UB’s “internal controls” that violates the agreement’s terms, AP/UB "shall have ten (10) calendar days to cure the defect" from the date of the report.

All of which is to say, AP/UB is clearly violating the agreement -- right now -- but I suppose it may take some time for the violation to get officially reported. And, I suppose the DOJ could allow for a correction once the violation is reported, although they are obviously under no obligation to do so.

Is AP/UB counting on enjoying a brief, technicality-based “grace period” or some such here? Would be amazing to think that the DOJ could possibly grant such, given the way the sites’ criminal activities are characterized the indictment and civil complaint.

Did I say amazing? Damn. It happened again.

(Thanks to Kevmath and PokerScout for helping me out with this one.)

Following the Story of the Story (AP & UB)

Yesterday there were a couple of poker-related news items that grabbed my attention. Yours too, probably. Both concerned the Cereus network’s terrible twins, Absolute Poker and UltimateBet.

One was the news that Haley Hintze has a deal with Dimat Enterprises to write a book covering the insider cheating scandals at the two sites.

Just about anyone who has heard of the scandals is aware that Hintze has been investigating this twisted, troubling tale for quite some time. Since they first started to appear in the fall of 2009, Hintze’s “Still Conjecturin’” posts regarding the scandals have been required reading for anyone with any interest in what happened (and has continued to happen) at AP and UB. As someone with such an interest -- and as a fan of detective stories! -- I can’t wait to read Hintze’s account.

I have a couple of other reasons for being excited about the news of Hintze’s forthcoming book. For one, I’ve long thought she was one of the better writers/thinkers in this little field, and so would be interested to read anything Hintze wrote, regardless of the subject. I’m also a fan of Dimat and Matthew Hilger (whom I had a chance to interview for Betfair back in April 2010). I’ve found books published by Dimat have been of consistently high quality both in terms of content and presentation, which makes me even more pleased about yesterday’s news.

See Hintze’s blog for more on the book announcement. Also, check out Hilger’s Internet Texas Hold’em site where a special thread has been set up for discussions about the book. Some fun title suggestions being batted back and forth there at the moment.

The other AP/UB news item from yesterday concerned the announcement that both sites were cutting loose all of their sponsored pros, which I believe includes one from AP (Trishelle Cannatella) and 10 from UB (Eric Baldwin, Brandon Cantu, Bryan Devonshire, Prahlad Friedman, Maria Ho, Scott Ian, Adam Levy, Tiffany Michelle, Joe Sebok, and Dave Stann). That news comes on the heels other stories regarding raids in Costa Rica, bankruptcy rumors, and what appears to be a steadily decreasing likelihood of players ever recovering funds from accounts on the two sites.

In the wake of that announcement, much of the subsequent focus yesterday afternoon fell upon Joe Sebok, who as both a UB sponsored pro and “media and operations consultant” for the site has drawn a great deal of attention from the poker community over the last year or so.

After a week of Twitter silence, Sebok penned a blog post yesterday in which he addressed the news of his parting with UB and reflected on his tenure with the site.

When Sebok first signed with UB, I wrote a post (“The Sebok Surprise”) in which I likened my impression of the move to sweating a friend who looked as though he might be misplaying a hand. Judging from yesterday’s post, it appears Sebok did just that. Sounds like his holding was never that strong, he thought he had more chips to play with than he did, and his read of others at the table was way, way off.

Sebok joined UB in September 2009, coincidentally right around the time Hintze started publishing her “Still Conjecturin’” posts. I suppose one could say that over the last 20 months both have been similarly motivated to publicize the story of the scandals.

But if it’s true both shared a similar goal, one was obviously much more efficient than the other when it came to achieving it.

The 24-Hour Poker News Cyclone

A ton happening over the last 24 hours in the poker world. Glad I’m not our buddy PKRGSSP trying to follow it all!

I mean, I wrote two posts yesterday -- one in which I fretted over my poker skills becoming atrophied the longer my break from cash game play extends (“My Mind Is Going... I Can Feel It...”), the other summarizing poker-related highlights from yesterday’s House hearing (“House Judiciary Committee Discusses Online Poker with U.S. Attorney General Holder”). And I could probably write at least three more today.

One would concern Federated Sports and Gaming announcing both its criteria for membership in its professional poker league and the first 218 players to qualify to participate in its inaugural season’s worth of tourneys, set to begin in August. FS+G Chairman Jeffrey Pollack and Executive Vice President and League Commissioner Annie Duke talked at length about the current status of the professional poker league with PokerNews yesterday.

With Black Friday having caused the cancellation of a number of poker shows as well as the nixing of Full Tilt Poker’s Onyx Cup, the FS+G’s poker league’s prospects for success may well have improved significantly over the past couple of weeks, particularly if those rumors about the FS+G having partnered with a major TV network (CBS?) to cover its events prove true.

Another post could discuss how more signs have surfaced that the Cereus network’s days are numbered -- and that players’ funds on Absolute Poker and UltimateBet could possibly be worth approximately the same as my enormous play money roll on PokerStars (sick brag).

See Bill Rini’s post from yesterday for further details about recent announcements, that internal memo from AP’s Executive Management Team that was leaked yesterday, and a letter to AP’s shareholders. Rini concludes that all of the evidence points to a strong likelihood that “UB players are going to get screwed” when it comes to cashing out.

Haley Hintze did some more “conjecturin’” yesterday, too, noting how that internal memo’s reference to the formation of a “much smaller company that is focused on continuing our non-US operations” could be part of a “ruse to buy time” for the execs to gather up what’s left of AP and hightail it outta Costa Rica.

Incidentally, let me share two bits of hilarity with regard to the AP/UB mess. One is Matt Kaufman’s inspired post from last week over on his blog, Poker Smell, titled “UB Cashout Options Revealed.” Some big grins there. The other I can’t share with you directly, unfortunately, but can only describe.

The panel on QuadJacks spent some time yesterday trying to get through to UB’s customer service. Upon being connected, an automated voice informed them the “estimated wait time” before speaking to a representative would be two minutes. The next notice was the wait would be three minutes (?). Then, two again. Then one. Then three! Then four, then five... on up to seven.

The whole sequence was laugh-out-loud funny to hear, not to mention an utterly perfect emblem of what UB has come to represent, I thought.

Finally, a third post might have focused on recent reports regarding the status of U.S.-based affiliates for both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.

I’m not as deep into the affiliate game as some of my colleagues -- I was a little late (and too lethargic) to position myself to grab a slice of that pie -- so I’m not as in touch with the ins and outs of the online poker affiliate story.

It appears, though, as fun (and lucrative, for some) as that story has been, the final chapter is not going to be a pleasant one for the American affiliates, as evidenced by Pauly’s post (regarding PokerStars) and this note over on Rake360 (regarding Full Tilt).

Like I say, any of these topics might have been worth exploring in individual posts. But to be honest, I want to write about other things, including one last Lima story I’ve been trying to get to for a couple of weeks now. So I think I’ll put all of this other stuff aside for now and focus on telling that one, which barring any other late breaking stuff I’ll try to do tomorrow.

Meanwhile, follow them links above if yr curious to learn more about any of these stories from the last day in poker.

We Leave the Sites, the Sites Leave a Legacy

Like many, I cashed out my entire balance from PokerStars last Tuesday, requesting a check rather than do the direct transfer to my bank. I had always just requested checks before when withdrawing, so that seemed the way to go.

I have since heard many report that they received their transfers within two or three days of cashing out, news that bodes well for my check arriving. And clearing, for that matter.

And like many, I still have cabbage sitting over in my account on Full Tilt Poker, though only just a few hundy. I imagine you probably received that email from FTP last Friday, too, in which we were told the return of funds to American players was a “top priority” and that they’ll “have a further update for U.S. players next week.”

You’ll recall how a few days after seizing the pokerstars.com and fulltiltpoker.com domains, the Department of Justice entered into “domain-use agreements” with Stars and Tilt “to facilitate the withdrawal of U.S. players’ funds held in account with the companies.” Meanwhile, no such agreement has been reached with either Absolute Poker or UltimateBet regarding the absolutepoker.com, ultimatebet.com, and ub.com domains.

I had no funds on either Absolute Poker or UltimateBet. I did have accounts on both sites for a short time -- accounts which I opened after the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 forced sites like PartyPoker and others on which I played to stop taking U.S. players’ bets.

But I withdrew my money from Absolute in October 2007, shortly after news of an insider cheating scandal broke. It’s been a while, but some remember how in the face of allegations Absolute initially reported there was “no evidence that any of Absolute Poker’s redundant and varying levels of game client security were compromised.” But more evidence soon came to light, and just a week later AP admitted to an “internal security breach.”

Was all I needed. Got my moneys off of AP (ASAP), then a couple of weeks later -- knowing that UltimateBet was run by the same crowd -- I cashed out from UB as well. Did so a few months in advance of the second, more extensive scandal breaking there (in March 2008).

My understanding is that U.S. players currently are unable to withdraw funds from either Absolute Poker or UltimateBet, although they have been able to continue playing on both sites -- despite pop-ups announcing U.S. players are blocked. (At least this was the case just a couple of days ago; I’m not certain what the status is today, but I believe it hasn’t changed.)

Meanwhile, non-Americans apparently are able to withdraw funds but are limited to $250 per week! If it seemed like poor judgment to keep playing at either site before, those willing to continue playing now with little or no prospect of cashing out appear beyond foolhardy. Then again, it probably doesn’t matter one way or another, as everyone with money on either site seems to be drawing mighty thin when it comes to the prospect of cashing out.

An article appearing in the St. Petersburg Times yesterday narrates the brief history of Absolute Poker’s rise and seemingly imminent demise, summarizing details of some of the suspect post-scandal machinations with investors that have occurred. It is part of a story Haley Hintze has been covering for some time, spelling out just how dire the situation at Absolute and Cereus (the network that includes AP and UB) is at present.

According to Poker Site Scout, traffic at the Cereus Network has steadily fallen over the last two weeks to about 25% of its pre-Black Friday levels. Meanwhile, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker continue to occupy the top two spots worldwide in terms of traffic, with both sites appearing to be seating around 65-75% the number of players they had prior to April 15.

While many players are understandably upset at how the four largest U.S.-facing sites variously put themselves in positions to be indicted as they were, it is nonetheless interesting to follow both how the sites are handling post-Black Friday fallout as well as players’ responses to the relative speed of communications and cashouts.

As before, PokerStars is easily winning the PR war at present with its rapid response. Full Tilt Poker had been experiencing significant problems with processors in the months leading up to Black Friday, perhaps one of several factors causing FTP to fall behind Stars here (again). And AP and UB aren’t surprising anyone with their continued failures on all fronts.

All four sites have been such a big part of the online poker playing world for so long, it will take some time before Americans let go of their feelings, opinions, and attitudes about each. PokerStars and UltimateBet have been around for a decade, AP since 2003, and Full Tilt since 2004. For better or worse, the sites have significantly shaped how we think about online poker -- from game play all of the way up to the not insignificant place online poker has in American culture.

And that will continue to be the case long after all Americans’ account balances on the four sites finally read “$0.00.”