Allegations of cheating and collusion have been made about Absolute Poker online tournaments as poker players on message boards have discussed the incident.

The most recent allegations refer to the POTRIPPER tournament. A player in that tournament calling himself POTRIPPER received by mistake an Excel spreadsheet that had on it the hole cards, IP addresses, Absolute Poker account ID numbers and email addresses of the majority of players in the tournament.

Nat Arem of pokerdb.com believes the series of events in this tournament were as follows:

1. “POTRIPPER was initially placed at table 13. He folded his first few hands.”

2. “About 2 and ½ minutes into the tournament, a railtard opened up table 13. The railtard had a Costa Rican IP address, which is where AP is located. The ID number of this account was 363 – a number so low that it probably pre-dated AP’s opening to the public.”

3. “Account 363 stayed at table 13 for the entire duration that POTRIPPER was there.”

4. “POTRIPPER started cold-calling every hand as soon as account 363 showed up.”

“The Excel spreadsheet is incomplete. Not all hands are listed and not all users are listed. However, the part that has been seen has been authenticated by several players in the tournament, according to those on 2+2, and it is generally accepted as being legit.”

“Obviously, given the Costa Rican connection, as well as account #363 being involved, it is now clear that this was an inside job, as opposed to being perpetrated by outside hackers.”

There is evidence to suggest this was an inside job. The IP address of account #363 has been recognised as that of Scott Tom, who up until a year ago was a senior figure at Absolute Poker. The email address scott@rivieraltd.com and his IP (which is the same as user #363) is the same as Scott Tom’s home cable modem, the poker community on message boards have alleged.  

Todd Witteles who is a limit holdem player and a big name in online poker, believes account #363 was set up as a superuser test account sometime in 2003 or 2004, which can see hole cards.

He writes, “Sometime in 2003 or 2004: Absolute Poker’s software is under development. Several hundred test accounts are created during the development and QA process. Among them is account #363, which is a superuser account. Account #363 unlike the others, has the ability to see hole cards at any table it opens. This can be an important tool during the testing process, as the developers can quickly and easily see that the pots are being shipped to the correct people. Of course, Account #363 is not actually registered to anyone, nor is it ever enabled to play in real money games. It exists strictly for “visual” purposes, and only used during the testing and development process.”

Witteles goes on to write that a programmer who lives in Costa Rica, who worked on Absolute Poker’s software upgrade, came across account #363 and realised the amount of money which could be won by using this account in AP’s games. He took over four legitimate accounts including POTRIPPER, that hadn’t been used for a while, which can be done at the server side by changing the passwords of these accounts.

Witteles continues to write, he played some short games with each of these accounts and logged on to account #363 on another computer to open up the table whilst playing to see the other players hole cards. After a while he also got friends and relatives involved preferably those who already have an AP account to avoid suspicion.

This went on for a couple of months until the programmer got greedy and started winning easily at which time suspicions of cheating were aroused. Witteles even writes that the cheater started losing some games to try to cover up his fraud. The accounts have now been frozen by AP.

Absolute Poker have responded to the allegations by saying, “As was stated in Absolute Poker’s Official Response released on Friday October 12th 2007, Absolute Poker conducted an extensive investigation in response to the claims it was made aware of and received. The results of that investigation indicated that to the best of Absolute Poker’s knowledge, information and belief there was no security breach.”

However, the investigations will continue.