Alright everyone, I usually give you all three podcast to listen to, but since one of the shows has a run time of four plus hours we will only be bringing you two shows. This week we are bringing you some of the newest information from the Ultimate Bet scandal.

Rabbit Hunt:

Our friends over at the Rabbit Hunt started off this weeks show with some news but the part we are all interested in starts at the 16:00 mark. The guys got mookman5, who is a wealth of information when it comes to the Ultimate Bet scandal, to come on the show and discuss the latest Travis Makar bomb that was dropped the week before. They discuss reasons why Makar would be coming out at this point and speculate on this lawsuit that he made mention to throughout the interview. Take a listen to the show on either the Cardrunners site or download it directly from iTunes to listen to this interview.

DonkDown Radio:

I usually do not repeat shows in back to back weeks, but these guys are at the center of the poker podcast world this week and have came back from last weeks bombshell of a show with a followup show that has a run time of over four hours. Do not be worried though, we will tell you where to skip ahead to so that you can save some time.

• 22:30 – Bryan Micon starts to discuss his meeting with Travis Makar, where he discusses some of the documents that he saw during the meeting.
• 45:10 – Brad Booth joins the show to discuss being cheated by the super-user accounts.
• 1:20:00 – Micon starts to break down the Addressing a Few Rumors on the UB Blog.
• 1:41:00 – Haley Hintze joins the show to discuss who may have actually made the payments to Zoltan “Brainwashdodo” Rozsa.
• 2:35:35 – Travis Makar calls into the show to ask Booth some questions, the first of which is how does he know that Russ Hamilton actually cheated him.
• 2:48:00 – Booth ask Makar what it is that he is truly looking for from bringing this information public.
• 3:19:36 – Dustin Woolf joins the show to discuss how he was cheated.

You can listen to the show at the DonkDown site or subscribe and download it via iTunes.

Finally, keep an eye out for a new episode of The Micros tonight, as it was posted on their Facebook earlier today that a new episode should be up tonight at around 9PM PT or 12AM ET.

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.

Teddy “The Iceman” Munroe: Watch out for this guy. Tough to play against.

Tom is was the chip leader in the $2k Omaha Hi-Lo. That’s pretty cool.

UPDATE: Tom is out. Not cool.

And that limit event he busted out of yesterday … Erick Lindgren just missed the final table, which is now set with some interesting players, including Teddy Munroe, Ali Eslami, and Vinny Vinh. (Teddy and I go way back — last year I’d be typing outside and “The Iceman” would fill me in on the $100-$200 cash action while taking a piss on the tournament tent air conditioners. “Makin’ money, baby!” he’d say before shaking himself dry and heading back to the table.)

Even the $10k 7-Stud World Championship is getting interesting … with Doyle still alive and both Bob and Maureen Feduniak with the potential to become the first ever husband-wife presumably non-collusive team at the final table. Never mind. Since typing this, all the above-mentioned have been eliminated.

I learned about this 7-Stud shape-up from the a WSOP-TV vid. And though I tend to detest any lack of imbeddability, I gotta say I like a lot of what this ESPN/WSOP/Bluff (?) crew has got going here. For example, Harmonie Krieger does a basic feature video interview set on the different jobs people come to the WSOP from. Nice enough, right? — but very real when one of the guys she talks with is Jay Columbo, who ran the legendary Mayfair and Playstation poker clubs in New York City, legally questionable status notwithstanding.

And then, perhaps most shocking to me, I enjoyed Jean-Robert Bellande’s “Surviving the WSOP” — where the young, aspiring Eskimo Clark chronicles his ups and downs at the World Series while his video-podcast editors comment Pop-up Video-style — follow along as he hustles high-rollers for buy-ins.

Even learned something from Phil Ivey’s less exciting V-log … and that is that he’s playing so many big-field, low-buy-in donkfests because he has a lot of side action pending on whether or not he’ll win a bracelet this year. We’ll see if we can’t find out more about this.

Speaking of donkfests, the Ladies Event has already lost 2/3 of its starting field, and of those still remaining, at least three of them are Pokerati MySpace friends: Lacey Jones, Kathy Liebert, and Mandy Baker are looking strong and pretty much representing the spectrum of all that is good about women. Go girls! I mean chicks … er babes .. uh bitches?

UPDATE: Lacey is nursing a short stack. Poker Roadie Amanda Leatherman has come on strong, however, and picked up the aggressive pace. Michele Lewis, Tiffany Michele, and PokerNews editrix Haley Hintze are all out.

In the meantime, primarily because it is awesomely embeddable, check out the debut episode of The Degenerate Report, from Neverwin Poker:

Been a couple of news items over the last week or so regarding the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. You remember the UIGEA. You don’t? Look over yr shoulder. It’s that big black cloud over there, heading this way . . . .

First, a U.S. District Court Judge threw out the Interactive Gaming Media Entertainment and Gaming Association’s case against the U.S. government. You might remember iMEGA had attempted to have the UIGEA’s implementation postponed until it could be determined whether or not the law was unconstitutional. (They had some other points in there, too.) The case was dismissed, but iMEGA was recognized as having “legal standing” and so will surely continue the fight.

Meanwhile, we learned this week what the American Banking Association had to say about the proposed UIGEA regulations. Recall that back in October, the feds presented their proposed regulations & asked for comments. The comment period ended in mid-December, and now the Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System are considering those comments as they prepare to “finalize” the UIGEA.

The abridged version: the ABA thinks the UIGEA is not A-OK. Gives the banks too much to do — more than they can feasibly handle. In fact, the ABA believes the UIGEA will place most banks in what they call a “compliance trap” and thus do more to hurt the American payments system than it will do to stop folks from gambling online. Read Haley Hintze’s PokerNews article & also check out the full text of the ABA’s comments over at Kick Ass Poker.

And for more from those comments to the UIGEA regs — including some of what the “webmaster of the popular blog Pokerati.com” had to say about ’em — check out Jason Kirk’s article over at PokerListings summarizing them all: “Stakeholders sound off on UIGEA regulations.”