First and foremost - major thanks to Nat Arem (who'll never get all the credit he should get for this - for those of you who haven't gotten the skinny, his blog has a great summary of the whole story at www.natarem.com), Michael Josem, and everyone who's talked to me, emailed me hand histories, and kept persistently digging long past when most people would have stopped bothering. You've all not only uncovered the biggest scandal in online poker history - you've forced a cheater to disgorge as much as a million dollars. There are literally hundreds of people that will be getting a lot of money back because of your efforts, and without them, none of this would have been possible.

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The title of this entry is definitely early - I haven't seen AP's statement, and, for all I know, will be spending two more weeks uncovering dirt. There's certainly plenty of dirt to go around; as one involved party told me recently, he'd heard all over the place that "Scott Tom is pretty much the worst person in Costa Rica"...and that was *before* the scandal broke. Certainly, I'm not going to be surprised if their statement blames the whole thing on an inside hack; that's really their only way out at this point.

Having said that, I'm told this blog is going to be very popular very shortly (hi, MSNBC!), and even as one of the people heavily involved in uncovering this, I really, truly feel this scandal misrepresents what online poker is today. As such, I think I owe it to everyone to outline the ongoing and likely consequences.

First, what's happening at Absolute Poker right now as you're reading this is unprecedented. Word on the street is that certain owners are being forced out of management. These people will no longer have any kind of operational pull at the company going forward (nor, it goes without saying, access to superaccounts.) In addition, and just as importantly to the industry, the scandal has forced the Kawanahke Gaming Council - an auditing group that is a big player in online poker and has herefore been heavily involved with Absolute's management, to say the least - to step up, grow a spine, and begin a wide ranging audit of both Absolute and Ultimate Bet, conducted entirely by a reputable third party. The ramifications going forward for KGC are large enough that I am very positive they will never be asleep on the job for a very long time.

Second, the rest of the online poker industry has been goggling at this for days and has taken an enormous amount of action. Multiple major affiliates, with hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to lose, have pulled their Absolute Poker ads; magazines and online media entirely dependent on only a handful of revenue streams have begun covering the scandal and also pulling AP ads; and, of course, the sites themselves - although it must be said that everyone is swearing up and down that the type of stupidity we just saw at AP would never be repeated anywhere else - are beefing up internal security to match.

But most importantly, I am proud to say that this is no longer the game it was 40 years ago. Most of us in the community have heard the old time Texas stories of people robbing games, then sitting down to play in them the next day and going unpunished. Today, we've set a new precedent, one that will likely govern this game going forward. Within a month of a cheater running a game taking a million dollars from his customers, the playerbase, the affiliate base, and everyone else dependent on this game for their livelihood revolted and managed to uncover the entire scandal. Insiders lined up to tell their stories, a likely whistleblower provided a key piece of evidence at a critical moment, and a company that could technically have gotten away with it instead spent a week leaking like a sieve, because a number of people felt compelled to do the right thing. This will not be the last time that happens, and even though this has been a dark time for online poker, I feel that this will make the game a better, safer place going forward.

Again, thanks to everyone that has provided invaluable assistance in this matter.

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At any rate, Nat tells me AP's ready to cave.
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15 minutes later:


PocketFives just received a phone call from Absolute Poker confirming the suspicions of the online poker community over the past month. While we need to be vague in this post to respect their wishes, we can say that their systems were compromised, and that they are prepared to provide the details in a statement coming shortly.

Part of the statement will include a plan to refund players affected by this compromise.

We are extremely relieved to hear this outcome, as our most important goal in all this is to see justice given to those who were cheated in this process. Pocketfives is extremely proud to have played a part in the process of uncovering the impropriety that has occurred. We would of course like to thank all the other parties who played a key role in this process—specifically the folks that have been posting here and at twoplustwo.com.

This is great news for everyone. Keep your eyes out for the statement.

Extremely Relieved,

--Adam

I spent a large chunk of today giving interviews to some surprising places after the Associated Press (the good AP, not the bad AP) picked up the story. Whether stressing that this is an absolutely (I'll never get tired of this) isolated incident did any good remains to be seen.

The first of two big surprises on the day came from a really good reporter for a paper in Montreal. Did you know that the guy who used to run the KGC, an Indian chief with the last name of Norton, also owns/owned (unclear) Absolute? The good news is that the audit they're ordering is likely legitimate anyway, since at this point, they're panicking hard and in no position to cover anything else up. The bad news is, this isn't the greatest time for that news to come out. Oops.

The second surprise, all of 30 minutes old, makes all of the detective work we did pretty much obsolete if it checks out, because...

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http://www.fullcontactpoker.com/poker-forum/index.php?showtopic=110060&st=440&#entry2201691

Alright, some pretty crazy [censored].

I was just talking to a friend of mine who plays heavily at Absolute Poker (he would rather be left nameless) about the recent POTRIPPER scandal. He does not post/read any internet forums, and was unaware of the situation. After linking him to a couple of the summaries, he had some very interesting things to add.

When I mentioned that people had linked Scott Tom, the former CEO, to the case, he immediately recognized the name, and said he knew the guy. He had sat at a table roughly 5-6 months ago, where a guy claimed to be Scott Tom, and wanted him to test the new AP 8.0 software. This guy seemed to know a lot about him (email, location, first name, deposit history), and even put $300 in my friends account to prove he was from AP (by credit adjustment, not deposit/transfer). He also emailed him the new software from this email address: stom@fiducix.com.

Just to make sure my friend contacted AP support to see if this guy was legit. The email re received back might break this case wide open:

Thank you for contacting us.

We contacted our promotions department and they informed us that steamroller belongs to the Absolute Poker Staff. For this reason, what he offered you is in legit.

Good luck at our tables.

Thanks for playing at Absolute Poker! If there is anything else we can help you with, please let us know. We are here for you!

Sincerely,

Aaron
Team Absolute ~ Customer Support
"To Continue to be the Best and Most Trusted"
Support@AbsolutePoker.Com

We’re Here To Stay! All Players Welcome!

Come and join the action this weekend with our 150k guaranteed on Saturday and 60k on Sunday! With more and bigger guaranteedtournaments, Absolute Poker is your place to play. See you at the tables whenever, wherever!
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I'm waiting on the email headers and the actual email before I anoint these guys the Official Worst Cheaters of All Time. That said, does anyone really doubt this one's legit, too? Forget all this complicated IP address nonsense - they used the same freaking account that they already advertised as tied to the site. BRILLIANT.

At any rate, Nat tells me AP's ready to cave. Let's see how much more incompetence comes out before they do; I'm literally stunned at how arrogantly stupid these guys were.

Major and minor updates this morning in our developing story:

-AP has announced a full internal audit by the Kawanakhe Gaming Council, their licensing agency, using an outside group of auditors, Gaming Associates. Word is mixed on whether these are legitimate, independent agencies, but to be fair, there are some reasons to believe they are.

-In the meantime, several P5's staff members are at the AP office in Costa Rica, basically doing their own fact check before AP's hired guns get there to do it themselves. Among other things, Absolute had this to say to them:

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4) They sounded very confident that information will eventually come out exonerating them of all allegations. They believe they can prove that it's not possible to do what people are alleging, as well as that it was never possible in their system. They believe the third party audit will confirm that as well.
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Yeah. I make calls of gigantic all in checkraises on the turn with T high, no draw, and have the best hand all the time. Hasn't everybody done this at one time or another? Also, this former employee of a well known site says you're full of crap.

In other words, we can forget about a clean resolution to this in the near future (especially since they're still stonewalling as to what account #363 even is and have refused to talk about whom the five accounts belong to. It's a bit late, guys; we've got all the names. What we're looking for now is where to send the pitchforks.)

-In version 7 or 8 of the 2+2 thread (I've been locking them at 600-800 replies and starting new ones, so it's whatever number the one before last was), we've got an old AP prop player saying:

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The reason I haven't been vocal is because I have very little to add. And because I met many people I could have easily confused names and faces, and that would mean I could be criminalizing the wrong people.

I have been to the offices of AP personally. I sat in what I believe was Scott Tom's office for hours watching him play PokerStars on the account FatRaiser (I think). He played horrendously awful and it wouldn't surprise me if he were behind the cheating incident because the arrogant and oblivious-to-being-caught ways the cheaters went about cheating would be consistent with something I would expect of just about anyone I met there, but especially the guy playing the FatRaiser account. These guys just had no clue how to play poker.

I caution once again that the person I am talking about was definitely the top guy in the office but may not have been Scott Tom. Probably 85% certain his name was Scott though.

Once incident I can share that in reality says very little about any possible cheating scandal but does say something about how much of a douchebag the guy I met was: He rando-banned a player who was playing a play money game on his site. He just opened up the table, busted out the virtual banstick and banned her right in the middle of the hand while cackling and clearly in love with this pathetic demonstration of power.

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Scott Tom: an *awesome* human being.

-While on the topic of awesome human beings, we now have confirmation on several of AJ Green's other online accounts - FATRAISER on Stars (note that Google shows him playing a random $50 tournament in September and then being a complete donator at 25/50 NL one month later) and Potchopper on UB (the latter account has never cashed in a tournament in around 20 tries.) I also have uncorroborated evidence on his FTP account, where he has also, to no one's surprise, recently moved up to become a gigantic 25/50 NL fish. Just remember that while Absolute cannot tell us whom POTRIPPER belongs to, they are confident that it is, in fact, impossible to see hole cards and make all in calls on the turn with ten high no draw...err, wait, scratch that last one, I guess that's just homefield advantage.

-The scandal hit Digg for about a day, has been covered in several European newspapers, and is due to be covered in an MSNBC article tomorrow. I'm also talking to ESPN today (fortunately, not on TV, heh) to go along with the P5's podcast.

More developments as they unfold, yada yada.

Latest breaking news:

At this point, every AP insider is swarming over Nat Arem's (www.natarem.com) and my own instant messenger looking to spill the goods. In the last 12 hours, we've uncovered a gigantic amount of info. First and foremost:

The Potripper account is registered to AJ Green, Absolute's former Director of Operations and Scott Tom's best friend who is currently a VP of operations at nine.com. AJ Green is also 2+2's own POTSLAMMER, he of the 3 posts shilling for AP, who was defended by The Watchdog (Tom Scott), also shilling for AP. There is far more to be had along this line of inquiry, but releasing it now would compromise a couple of side investigations we've got going - expect more updates soon, though.

In the meantime, allow me to coin a new phrase: the plot thins.

Also, in half an hour, I've got an MSNBC phone interview about this, followed by one or two other media outlets.

update: I will also be on the Pocketfives podcast tonight as a last minute substitute. In the meantime, the story hit Digg, where it's currently #3, and 2+2 is experiencing record, 10/11/06 (UIGEA) topping traffic. This will be very big very soon.