Absolute Poker Scandal Breaks

Absolute Poker scandal is breaking news today in the poker world. More and more information is coming out about what happened to the security breach in Absolute Poker.

The whole thing got rolling when some players started to suspect that certain players were cheating. Then a player by the name Marco played in a tournament at Absolute Poker on September 12 and lost to a player named Potripper. Marco thought some of the plays were kind of suspicious that he won, so he emailed Absolute Poker to give him his hand histories in the tournament and instead of getting that he received the hand histories of everyone’s hands that were participating in the tournament. After looking at all of Potripper’s hands it was very obvious that he was able to see everyone’s hands in the tournament.

Potripper wasn’t the only suspicious player though. There were three others. They were named Steamroller, DoubleDrag, and GrayCat. The suspicion came from their win percentages at showdown, their river aggression and their very loose preflop play. All of these accounts were originally owned by people spread out throughout the United States. The only thing is that these accounts hadn’t been used in quite some time because they were big winners at Absolute Poker. It seemed that the original owners of the accounts had abandoned Absolute Poker, so they weren’t in frequent use anymore. The only thing is that these accounts never cashed out their money. They got their friends or relatives to make an account on the site, or they already had one, and they would play them head to head and lose all their money to them. The friends or relatives would then cash out the money and that is how they got the money. For an outline of the whole ordeal, a good site to go to is http://www.neverwinpoker.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=44393. This is a good source on what happened. But according to this site, on September 17 the accounts of Potripper, Steamroller, DoubleDrag, and GrayCat were frozen for a further investigation on if they were cheating or not.

Another account in question is the account that is called #363. The reason this account is so suspicious is because this account had to be made at the very beginning of the development of the Absolute Poker site. They created this account to test the site before it was released to the public. This account had the ability to see every hole card that was being played at each table. Another interesting thing about this account is since it was created in the beginning of the Absolute Poker site then the account is tied very closely to someone with intimate ties to the company, like an owner, founder, employee, programmer, etc. The other interesting thing that was discovered about this account was on October 14 Potripper’s IP address was registered to Costa Rica and that he was the user of account #363. This is pretty damning evidence against the suspicion that these players were cheating people out of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars.

So, now the question is who is behind this scandal? Most people believe it was an inside job. Someone working there came across the account #363 and decided to use it to their advantage. It has also been discovered that somehow Scott Tom, who is the owner and CEO of Absolute Poker may have been involved. Another discovery is that Potripper was found out to be former Director of Operations at Absolute Poker AJ Green. Green is now the Director of Operations at nine.com. Absolute Poker has a mess on their hands. Another good site to look at for more information is http://casinosmack.com/blog/the-absolute-poker-scandal/.

Absolute Poker hasn’t really commented on this issue. It was said that they would make a comment but nothing has really been said. Stay posted for more updates on this unraveling story.