Anthony in McKinney-ish writes in and wants to know:
I make your site one of my usual surf stops and like what you guys have to offer. Given the current frenzy surrounding Absolute Poker and the \”superuser\” account, why has this not been addressed?
This Absolute thing may be the biggest thing to hit online poker since Moneymaker won the WSOP. Bigger than the JJProdigy thing, multiaccounting, etc. This may very well rock the poker world as we know it.
By the way, I\’m stunned at the number of people playing that do not know about this. I\’ve been aslking at every table I\’ve played at yesterday and today if my opponet(s) were waware of the AP thing and have not found a single player who knew about it.
Anthony, we took note of this a while back, but I have to admit, I kinda dismissed it as the \”online poker is rigged\” conspiracy theory we\’ve gotten so used to making fun of.
The tournament was won by a player named POTRIPPER who made a crazy call with T high against Marco’s 9 high flush draw. In the following days, Marco emailed with AP support and asked for a hand history so he could review POTRIPPER’s play at the final table. There were rumors that POTRIPPER could see hole cards and he wanted to follow up because of the possibility that he was cheated.
This in and of itself was why I didn\’t look too closely at the allegations. After all, I personally once made a ridiculous call for all my chips and a lot of money (to me) with Jack-high when, after going into the tank, I thought through the hand and with near-certainty put my home-game buddy on a busted 9-high straight draw. I was correct, and obviously 10-high woulda held up, too.
But apparently there is FAR MORE to this story, and as the New York Times points out, there is now more than a circumstantial smoking gun …
Another reason I didn\’t give it much credence is because I long ago wrote off Absolute Poker as \”bad company.\” I knew a few people who worked for them, and when times got tough in the online poker world — shortly after the passage of the UIGEA — they treated the underlings very shittily, right down to withholding relatively small amounts of money that was clearly owed to people for whom several thousand dollars actually meant a lot to. But in retrospect, under the notion that things trickle down from the top, this should have been a red flag about what is possible within that company.
I remember during the heyday of the underground Dallas poker scene … the market became so scrambled that a lot of rooms were actually struggling to survive. And that, of course, led to people who chose to make their livings in a legally questionable business to show their true colors and do a lot of shady things. Meanwhile, most of the successful rooms made sure they did everything right — figuring that was their long-term edge, I suppose.
However, when shit really started to hit the fan, and it became apparent that the jig wouldn\’t last for much longer, one of these rooms turned bad. They began telling dealers to rake as much as possible — and the room even began to put more green chips in play (in a $5/$10 game) to facilitate this.
So why wouldn\’t similar greed be kicking in in the online poker world? Especially if it began to become clear in the new political landscape that even if UIGEA laws are changed, Absolute was going to be left out of a regulated environment. I have no evidence to show that as the case … but I do know that Absolute (and Ultimate Bet?) have not been actively engaged in changing their American player circumstances as, say, Party, PokerStars, and Full Tilt have been.
