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10/21/2007: Absolute Poker - Absolute cheating?
Online gambling is a gamble in itself.
A popular poker site called Absolute Poker may be dealing with criminal charges after players figured out some inside cheating. If you believe online poker is about trust, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate your stance. Freakanomics:
Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents’ hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who’d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker “accidentally” did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player’s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put “accidentally” in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whomever “accidentally” sent the file gets their proper hero’s welcome in the end.
Then the poker players went to work analyzing the data — not the hand histories themselves, but other, more subtle information contained in the file. What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about online poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the tournament.
So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual named Scott Tom, who seems to be a part-owner of Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the Web site had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.
If this is all true, I presume that the two cheaters are looking at potential prison time. I would also guess that if Absolute Poker continues to argue that nothing out of the ordinary happened, they will take an enormous hit to their profits. Online poker is a game of trust — players send their money to a site believing that they will be playing a fair game, and trusting that the site will send them their winnings.
Internet gambling grew by 28% in 2005 and profits are estimated to have been 14.71 billion dollars.
Administrator
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
[...] In “Online gambling scandal” we are told that AbsolutePoker.com, one the 10 most frequented gam(bl)ing sites in the world, has been the subject of much debate after players found evidence of cheating. Users have posted complaints, and when Absolute Poker revealed the data behind the hands played, it indicated one player was able to see the cards held by other players! Gambling Watch Global followed this earlier. Absolute Poker statement by Joe Norton about the inside cheating scandal. He was the former Great Chief of the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake. In the statement he identified himself as the owner of Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG, which is the holder of 100% interest in Absolute Poker. [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 3:38 am
some one at AP hacked $700 from my acct. only AP knew my log in and pass word….if you have money in your acct. take it out and just leave a few dollars if you want to still play there. i am not the only one that this has happened at AP..
July 28th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Agreed Elaine, hacking is common