By now, anyone who takes online poker seriously in any way has prbly already heard about what happened over at Absolute Poker in the last few weeks. It seems that a player was identified during a $1K buy-in tourney as making calls, raises, and folds that only someone with intimate, detailed knowledge of other player’s holecards could have possibly made. He was basically able to maximize his profits and minimize his losses perfectly. An investigation was launched after the hand histories were posted all over the online poker forums and AP recently confirmed that there was in fact cheating going on during that tournament. It was initially believed that a rougue techie who hadn’t worked for AP in over a year was to blame, but now it seems that the scandel came from one of the highest sources at AP: A former VP of Operations. Pretty scary shit.

This is obv bad news for the online poker world, in every aspect. I have a hard enough time as it is convincing family and friends that being an online poker pro is a legitimate profession. However, when I stop and think about how much money is being played for everyday on all the sites, I’m not surprised this happened at all. In fact, it was really only a matter of time until something serious like this occured. Given that the bad beat jackpot was recently started on AP, I can’t help but wonder how legitimate the jackpot winners were…??? I am just happy it didn’t happen on one of the two major sites, Stars and Tilt. I know that Stars WCOOP main event winner of 1.3 million was recently disqualified after Stars launched an investigation into him and determined he was cheating in some way. Everyone moved up in pay by one spot. I haven’t heard what the cause of his disqualification was, but it sure does make me wonder. I’m confident that the source of the cheating had nothing to do with the site itself (it was prbly player collusion) as opposed to the AP scandel where you had a person in charge of things at the root of the betrayal.

I doubt that these serious cheating scandels are happening on a daily basis across the sites, but with all the money out there to be won, one thing is certain: Somebody out there right now is scheming up a plan to cheat us out of our money… and there will always be that threat. Its no different from “real life”… Where there is money, there will always be crooks. Its just something we have to learn to live with.

Full Blog: JimmytheHat19.blogspot.com