Article Avenue - free articles and downloads - Cheating In The World Of Online Poker

By Nick Laurrell

Heavens, did the Kahnawake Gaming Commission just expose Russ Hamilton? Gee willickers, isn’t he connected with UltimateBet, that site that ‘MSNBC’ and ‘60 Minutes’ did something on? And I’ve heard that they are also connected to that other cheating site, what is the name… Absolute Poker?

Who knew that type of stuff was going on in online poker? Thank Goodness for the KGC regulating this all for us – those guys have our backs.

So...

One of my favorite books is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment – I love it. I hadn’t read it in years and years but as it happens, I had just finished giving it a read when the KGC statement confirming Russ Hamilton as the UB super-user came out. I laughed to myself because there’s a part in it where one of the investigators looking into Raskolnikov and the murder of the old woman, laments that his smoking habit is destroying his health.

I believe that the US Government did not officially recognize smoking as an unhealthy habit until the mid 1970’s – Crime and Punishment was written in the mid 1860’s.

The KGC announced on Monday September 29 that 1994 WSOP Main Event champion Russ Hamilton had defrauded Ultimate Bet players for about 4 years between 2004 and 2008 to the tune of… well… we’ll get back to that in a second.

There was a time when most online poker players did not believe that super-users actually existed. How could they? After all, there were big regulatory agency thingies taking care of all this… stuff.

Just like there are people watching out for the American consumer, so that they don’t mistakenly believe that one of their favorite habits is actually killing them.

Killing them.

I’m surprised when people who consider themselves “up” on the current state of the online gaming industry don’t seem to know two little facts:

1. Ultimate Bet is owned by the same parent company that owns Absolute Poker, Tokwiro (which was originally created as a corporate umbrella to own these two companies.) And of course,

2. Tokwiro is owned by Joe Norton, the former head of the Kahnwake Gaming Commission.

Absolute Poker’s big cheater was its former owner and creator, Scott Tom.

UltimateBet’s big cheater was its kind of sort of owner (love those legal loopholes) and semi creator, Russ Hamilton.

Both companies are ostensibly owned by the guy who was in charge of the regulatory agency serving as the ONLY major consumer advocacy group which had been endowed with the necessary actionable powers to have curbed, curtailed or caught those crimes as they were being committed, Joe Norton.

And oh yeah, neither the Absolute Poker or UltimateBet super-user scandals were first detected by the KGC.

Neither.

Both scandals were first detected by online poker players, poring over their player notes on the popular poker forum 2+2 . The names of both Scott Tom and Russ Hamilton surfaced after cursory searches by non-police trained online poker players revealed illicit connections between the screen names in question and various real world possessions of both former owners.

And now, a mere 3 months after the festering stinking trail of evidence leading from the “sleepless” account to Russ Hamilton was laid bare on 2+2, the KGC has found evidence of his wrongdoing to the tune of… well, we’ll get to that at some point.

Where are Annie Duke, Phil Hellmuth and Freddy Deeb? Those three have been the most vocal supporters of UltimateBet, each owning some cockamamie percentage of the company themselves. Annie is a poker “consumer advocate” who just got her foot shoved so far into her mouth, God knows if she’ll be able to keep up with her renowned advocacy speeches –

No official comment as of 3 days after the KGC findings.

And Freddy Deeb, the multiple WSOP bracelet winner, cash game mega-star and winner of the prestigious $50K HORSE WSOP event in 2006; the man who had been receiving $50K+ loans from Hamilton himself through the UB system itself –

No official comment as of 3 days after the KGC findings.

And Phil Hellmuth Jr., the all time leader in all things WSOP, probably the biggest celebrity in the poker world today and the man who was a longtime friend of Russ Hamilton, who was in on the inception of UltimateBet and who has direct connections to some of the properties unearthed on the 2+2 forum as related to the NIONIO scandal -

No official comment as of 3 days after the KGC findings.

And what is anybody screaming about the absurd connection between Joe Norton, the KGC, the impossibilities of legal recourse for any of this and the general interests of the more than 500,000 people who play real money online poker?

Because that’s the real point – not that some former WSOP champ is a crook (believe me, he’s not the only one; we’re dealing with professional gamblers after all) but that thousands of people have had… well, how much money have all those people had taken? THERE IS NO WAY TO EVER KNOW!

Though UB has already paid out more than $6 million in reimbursements to players, thousands of past players have claims pending official something or other.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have already proven that the ownership of UB itself historically has been crooked - do you think that it may just be a possibility that those same crooked people may have been destroying documentation along the way that may have come back to bite them?

And the KGC had the gall to impose a $1.5 million fine against UltimateBet – pathetic. The KGC is the one who’s been asleep at the wheel, and if you were going to draw any conclusions between the uncannily disturbing connections between UB, AP and the KGC, then they’ve been doing a lot more than just neglecting their responsibilities.

Something really bad is and has been going on for a long time. It is baffling me to how any player of their own free will could ever play another penny on Ultimate Bet or Absolute Poker, but sure enough, according to pokerscout.com, the traffic has remained pretty consistent at both UB and AP.

Which is gross.

The online community has known which sites have obviously criminal activity going on for more than a year – how in God’s name is it taking the guys who do this for a living so long to catch up?

I don’t know who is behind all of this or if there even is a single cause beyond the unending exemptions that very wealthy very greedy people provide themselves in the pursuit of exploiting whoever they can. I am, however, 100% sure that of all the parties getting cast under the harsh light of investigation, the one which has consistently deflected the most fire is maybe the one which merits the closest inspection: the Kahnawake Gaming Commission.

But who is going to investigate the investigators?

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