AP and UB Poker Super-User scandals back in the headlines

I suppose cheating poker players out of $22 million -that’s just the total from Ultimate Bet-will keep a story going for quite some time, but the Super-User scandals that plagued first Absolute Poker and then Ultimate Bet have once again found center stage thanks to some more investigative work by the like of Haley Hintze, and 2+2 poster Mookman5.

Their tireless investigation into uncovering every responsible party and the complete timeline and specifics of the cheating led to a two-part piece over at WickedChops Poker that has brought the scandal back to the forefront.

So the story that refuses to die has a couple new wrinkles:

• 1. When and what did UB founder Greg Pierson know?
• 2. Who was involved in the scandal?

To the first point the WickedChops story seems to imply that Pierson was either complicit, or was basically clueless as to what was going on -think Kevin Pollack’s character in the movie Casino. The actual genesis of “God-Mode” is still up for debate with two camps: One stating it was a later addition by Hamilton, and the other side saying the “God-Mode” capability had been there since the outset.

The second point is starting to get a bit convoluted after a leaked list of names was released, which included a couple of well-known poker players who appear to have been used to funnel money through and nothing more; in addition to a number of fake names and addresses.

With so many players affected, and so much money being involved this story will likely never die down until every single aspect is uncovered, and the chances of that happening are slim to none. So, we are left with the likely prospect that the true extent of the cheating will never truly be known -and as we learned recently from the PokerStars response to the StoxTrader collusion allegations; the online poker sites are loathe to take any action without 100% certainty.

What the two incidents should do is cause online poker players to take pause and decide if the risks associated with playing ultra-high-stakes online poker are worth it: It’s a certainty that when millions of dollars are at stake there are a number of humans who will do just about anything to get it.

And now we have Super-User allegations being thrown at another online poker room, Cake Poker, but because of their restrictions to data-mining and allowance of frequent screen-name changes IF there was a Super-User on the site it would be virtually impossible to detect their activity without complete access to the site’s databases of information.