Steve O’Dwyer
Photo: PokerStarsBlog.com

Today’s Boxscore

Steve O’Dwyer €1,224,000 – 2013 EPT Grand Final
Steven Silverman €775,000 – 2013 EPT Monaco High Roller
Paul Volpe €130,000 – 2013 EPT Monaco 6-Max

Steve O’Dwyer has been making a lot of noise in Europe for a longtime but it wasn’t until Sunday night that he was able to capture his first EPT title. He won on their biggest stage against arguably one of the toughest final table is major poker tournament history. O’Dwyer defeated Andrew Pantling for the title but that was just one hurdle at a table which included Daniel Negreanu, Jason Mercier, Noah Schwartz, Jake Cody, Grant Levy, and Johnny Lodden. It was a well earned victory for one of the favorites on tour.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, and that is certainly a possibility with Mother’s Day weekend, you would have noticed Travis Makar released some secret Ultimate Bet recordings which have set the world all a-twitter and might be the situation to cause 2+2 to implode upon itself. There is a ton of information to be derived from the recordings and you can find some of the best in the link dump below.

The winner of the week? Jen Larson who now finds Lock Poker to be the second biggest story in poker at the moment. Have no fear, the Eye of Sauron will be back on them soon enough.

Link Dump

Travis Makar Releases Damaging Ultimate Bet Recordings – The best writeup I saw with a breakdown of the recordings and all they contain. Pretty damning information for a lot of people involved and this is a good to start understanding it all.

Poker’s Watergate Moment – Another great recap by poker blogger “Grange95” with his take on the UB tapes including links to the actual recordings.

Phil Hellmuth statement on UB – Phil Hellmuth (or more accurately, his agent Brian Balsbaugh) released a statement about the recent revelations in the UB recordings via Kevmath and the 2+2 forums. He gives the entire thing a bit of the soft touch and not much in the way of an explanation. He might get a little more attention with the WSOP about to kick off.

Ultimate Poker Severs Ties with Iovation – The news this weekend also had an impact on newly launched Ultimate Poker when it came to light they were using former UB-tainted Greg Pierson’s company Iovation for player verification.

Gambler won £7.8m by ‘reading’ the back of cards – In different news, the story of Phil Ivey and the UK casino holding back his winnings has spewed forth more (and actually interesting) material. So who is this mystery woman who can read cards like this?

Many in the poker industry consider the UltimateBet and Absolute Poker scandals resolved, at least as much as we can expect them to be considering the sources of any information and the lack of the ability to involve U.S. law enforcement due to jurisdictional issues. And while some of us still have eyes and ears open for further developments, such as those that may appear on a Russ Hamilton twitter feed, Haley Hintze, former Editor-in-Chief of PokerNews, has decided to put out all of her well-informed conjecture on her own blog and gives one of the more detailed explanations of how, when, and why the UB/AP scandals were perpetrated. Though she has only posted Part 1, the rest of the story, we presume, is forthcoming.

Part 1 dives into the beginnings and how Hamilton got involved and possibly recruited help. Here is a portion of the post:

There are three reasonable scenarios for how the cheating spread, as spread it surely did:

1) One or more software engineers working on the UB code recognized the illicit profit potential for themselves, and also began to slice money from the games;

2) Hamilton himself recruited one or more Costa Rican workers to assist him in the cheating, as a way of expanding the total money being stolen;

3) Someone at UB caught Hamilton — probably noticing unusual withdrawal amounts relative to the amount of play Hamilton was logging — and decided to cut himself in for a slice of the action.

From some time in 2006, I believe, it was game on in a big way for the cheats. I’d heard whispers as far back as 2005 that something was wrong with the cash games at UB, but I played there very little, only at small stakes, and couldn’t really speak to it.

The post in its entirety can be found here.