A year late, but a good wrapup of what exactly took place. Also, if you’re like me and you’ve been basically away from the poker scene for a while, the recent updates to the story are new and somewhat frightening.
First, the figure I was presented with of $700,000 total bilked from high-stakes players has proven to be off by a factor of nearly THIRTY: “60 Minutes,” in conjunction with The Washington Post, put the total heist at over $20 million.
Second, the man now anchored at the center of the controversy holds a heavy place in poker lore, being so confident that he’d win his weight in silver as part of the prize for winning the 1994 WSOP Main Event that he put on more than 100 pounds:
Hamilton, however, has an advocate in poker pro and all-around Swell Fellow Barry Greenstein. As MSNBC.com noted, Greenstein and his poker-pro stepson Joe Sebok are the only people to speak to Hamilton since he was implicated, and Greenstein for one is convinced of Hamilton’s innocence: “Before I talked to [him], I thought it was more than 95 percent likely that he was involved in cheating . . . Now I think it’s more than 99 percent that he knows people who cheated well enough to transfer money with them, but I think it’s less than 50 percent that he actually cheated or knew that the people were cheating at the time.”
As for “60 Minutes,” they did a pretty good job, considering their audience is not exactly composed of rounder-wannabes. They confused the POTRIPPER tournament with a series of ring games, and at one point they displayed a blackjack hand instead of a poker hand. Also, they neglected to mention that Russ Hamilton was one of UB’s consultants from the very beginning, recruiting pros like Phil Hellmuth to the site. But they hit all the high points, and gave credit where it was due.
The one real complaint I have, though, is that they seemed to push extra-hard on online poker’s illegality. While the fact that it operates with one foot in the shadows is obviously germane to the story, because . . . well, where would the aggrieved parties seek redress? — “60 Minutes” seemed to overly accentuate it, mostly through their interviews with Todd Witteles, a.k.a. “Dan Druff.” They could have mentioned that online poker has never been explicitly banned (the UIGEA only prohibits transferring funds to online gaming sites, with the onus on the banks, not the players), and that organizations like the PPA are trying hard to carve exceptions into federal laws to exclude poker as a game of skill rather than a game of chance.
Witteles’s final blurb, to wrap the piece, was especially ominous because he implied that “superuser”-style cheating could be occurring right now, even on other poker sites. Which, while certainly plausible, has never even been alleged to the best of my knowledge. I certainly don’t weep for the way they may have treated AP/UB, but “60 Minutes” should at least have mentioned something about how player security is deployed at the average poker site, and perhaps how it can be or has been increased in the wake of the scandal.
While I would imagine that Witteles, along with the rest of us, would wish for an endgame in which online poker is legal and regulated by the same sort of state or tribal commissions who oversee brick-and-mortar play now — even if it means trading it for tax dollars — the overall tone of the piece seemed to imply that all online poker sites are front companies for swindlers and thieves, and that’s simply not the case.
What would help most is transparency, and that’s something that Absolute Poker and UltimateBet have lacked from the beginning, when they arrogantly told players whose statistical analysis all but proved their game was rigged to get bent. Hamilton, although professing his innocence, doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to prove it much. The poker community has shown that it will trade forgiveness for accountability: Mike Matusow has gone from poker to prison and back. Justin Bonomo has been reborn as a player after leaving his “ZeeJustin” multiaccounting days behind him. And even today, right now, players fully aware of this scandal are still choosing to play at the twin members of the newly-minted CEREUS Poker Network. Loss and redemption are as indelible a part of the fabric of poker as the felt on the table. Everyone gets a second chance. Hell, ESPN even let Prahlad Friedman freestyle rap a second time after his first attempt bombed.
The good news is that the players have powerful allies in “60 Minutes” and the Washington Post. While the investigation began only when a bunch of poker nerds put their heads together, those two media outlets have reach and clout that make the ad hoc crack squad look like Scooby-Doo and Mystery, Inc. If their determination is anywhere close to as dogged as their reputations, we may finally wind up with the answers we’ve sought for over a year.
However, with exposure comes consequences, and one of them may be that federal authorities come to believe that it’s better to kill the cockroaches than shine the light on them. Cautious players who are looking for governmental intervention should be careful what they wish for.
Posted by Mike in Ethics, Gambling, Poker, Poker Laws, WSOP