Players Uncover Cheating at Poker Site

Online players have been accusing poker Website Absolute Poker's Co-founder of cheating since the time they noticed a number of unusual bets being played. The players alleged that an owner of the site was supplying inside information secretly to a player to help him win his bid.

While playing on the site, some poker players became distrustful of the moves of one player and his betting patterns. The particular player was named Pottripper. The suspicion increased when Pottripper won a tournament of a substantial scale.

After a certain player requested of the tournament's complete record, someone at the site passed a file that had the history of all the players in the online game.

When some of the players jointly studied the file, they found that Pottripper's Internet protocol address was listed to Costa Rica's Scott Tom, one of the founders of Absolute Poker. It also became obvious that someone had full access to all the players' cards.

If the story is correct, it clearly indicates how the cheating process might have taken shape. An insider connected to the site who had full sight of all the hidden (or 'hole') cards was transmitting the information to someone outside the site, wrote Steven Levitt, an economist on his blog. Vnunet reported this on October 22, 2007.

Levitt said that on the grounds of this maneuver, the two accomplices would be close to imprisonment. He also presumes that even now if Absolute Poker keeps on denying the extraordinary incidents on the game site, they may have to lose enormous amounts of their profits.

Absolute Poker regards all accusations of collusion and fraud very seriously, the company said in a statement.

Hacking is commonplace among the highly technically skilled employees at the online gaming setups in Costa Rica while they don't intend to be malicious. This particular employee tried to prove that he could access the hole cards, a Senior Manager of the poker site told Gambling911.com.

Many strongly denied that Scott Tom was involved in the cheating scandal. A spokesperson for Absolute Poker said that Tom no longer had legal connections with the site.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/7/2007