Ultimate Cheat

From the company that brought you the 2007 online poker scandal, Ultimate Bet are pleased to announce the sequel.

Last year Absolute Poker were slammed with substantiated allegations that one of their owners was using his administrative access to secret information (such as the cards players held) and was calling up his friend on his cell phone and helping him win.

This understandably upset a whole bunch of people. The friend of the owner was making a killing, clearly following strategy that indicated an inside knowledge of the hands other player had (like folding kings pre-flop with no action before).

But this year the big brother of Absolute Poker decided to go one better with a scandal of their own. This time it involves some horrific lapses in judgment and quality control, together with what can only be described as a plethora of incompetence and stupidity.

The upshot of all this is that the online urban legend of being able to see people's hole cards was actually true for a small handful of people. These people were able to make tens of thousands of dollars playing high stakes poker, because of an insurmountable advantage.

Ultimate Bet, home to such poker pros as Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth Jr., were compromised in a way never before seen on a major poker site. They are facing tens of millions of dollars of refund requests, a multi million dollar law suit has cropped up. Not to put too finer point on it, they are in the shit!

Frankly, I never liked their site. I thought the software was ugly and clunky. I've ran ads on PokerXL.com for close to four years, and never received a dime from them, despite getting money from other sites. I took down my links today.

With the fiasco at Absolute Poker, followed by this PR disaster at Ultimate Bet, it is surely only a matter of time before one or both of them go under. It will be interesting to see the fall out from this.

Maybe President Obama will take the smart step of legalizing and regulating online poker. Because I somehow doubt that Harrah's would operate a poker web site so badly, while being regulated by say the Nevada Online Gaming Commission.