Tuesday, March 01, 2011

It just gets uglier and uglier

I don't follow the minutiae of the ongoing UltimateBlecch/Absolute Puker investigations, but I do read what shows up in places like Pokerati, and, especially, Haley Hintze's blog. Her latest installment, here, drops what was for me an unexpected bomb (though I gather that it won't be as much of a shocker to those who have been following things in more detail)--and that is that the main cadre of cheaters may have included TWO former WSOP Main Event winners, not just one.


It's all just so disgusting. What's most disgusting of all is how the company still goes on pretending that its hands are clean, that it was a victim, that a paper transfer of ownership somehow wiped all the muck and stains away.

No wait--what's even more disgusting than that is that there are apparently tens of thousands of people who continue to play on this site, who continue to hand over their money to these lying, thieving criminals. That I really, seriously, just cannot comprehend. What is wrong with you people?

3 comments:

astrobel said...

Hi Grump,

From what I've read on 2p2 from some regulars who play there their bottom line is just much better on Cereus. More $ at the end of the month, that's all.

zippyboy said...

On page 183 of the 2006 book Dirty Poker, (your favorite author) Richard Marcus details how he himself witnessed a player implementing the god mode to reveal holecards back in 2004. Interesting that everyone is still trying to find who was involved besides Russ Hamilton, yet no one has subpoenaed Marcus to expose his source for that part of the book. He called the program "Peeker", but the description seems consistent with many users having a simple key to put in the registry while they play, rather than a single site owner, or single programmer breaching the encryption. The 60 Minutes story on UB scandal 2 years ago weighed heavily towards outing Hamilton and didn't back up Marcus' claim that anybody could do this if they had bought the registry key, but now it looks like it could've been true, as the Donkdown emails suggest.

Rakewell said...

Yeah, this week's revelation that the capacity for superuser status was built right in to the software downloaded by every user, needing only the installation of a registry key, was one of the biggest "OMG" moments in the whole mess for me so far. Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that sort of security hole?