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2013 World Series of Poker Europe Releases Seven-Bracelet Schedule

wsopeuropelogoUp for a October trip to Paris?  If so, you’ll find plenty of poker players among your traveling companions, as World Series of Poker officials have released the 2013 WSOP Europe schedule, which includes seven bracelet events at a brand new venue in the Parisian ‘burbs.

This seventh edition of the WSOPE will be held October 12 through October 25, 2013 in Enghien-les-Bains, France, just about five miles (or eight kilometers) outside Paris.  The venue will be a convention center associated with the town’s Barriere casino (Casino Barrière d’Enghien-les-Bains), a century-old gambling club.  The old club itself lacks the capacity for the hundred or more tables needed for the event, which is why the majority of the action takes place at the “Pergola Nova” convention center across the street.

So what’s new for WSOPE VII?  Tournament officials have announced a “High Rollers” no-limit hold’em event with a €25,600 buy-in (about US $34,200), in addition to the €10,000 + €450 main event, and a genuine, European-style €1,000 + €100 no-limit donkament to kick off the French activities.

All told, the bracelet events include five no-limit hold’em and two pot-limit Omaha tourneys, the only types of tournament poker that can be played under French law.  One each of the NLHE and PLO tournaments will use the new “mixed-max” format, with changing numbers of players at the tables on different days.

Will the new Barriere property become a permanent home for the WSOPE?  That’s another one of the questions in search of an answer.  The WSOPE has experienced a nomadic first few years, moving from London to Cannes and then on to Paris, all while experiencing growing attendance throughout.

Dozens of satellite events and cash-game action will also be available at the 2013 WSOPE.  The complete day-by-day schedule of events is available here, courtesy of the WSOPE, with additional information to be published soon on the WSOP.com site.

 

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New Jersey Sportsbetting Tussle Continues, Feds Receive Brief Filing Extension

nj-postcardThe US Third Circuit Court of Appeals has granted a brief extension to federal Department of Justice attorneys battling the state of New Jersey’s plans to introduce sportsbetting within the state.  The latest brief, which was originally due today and will instead be filed by next Tuesday, is to include the latest responses from the organizations supporting the feds’ case — the NCAA, NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB.

The battle lines remain clearly drawn in New Jerseys battle to override the federal 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) on grounds of unconstitutionality.  New Jersey voters passed a referendum authorizing sportsbetting in 2011, which has led to the current legal battle with federal officials.

Under 1992′s PASPA, only Nevada was allowed to continue offering full-fledged sportsbetting services, with three other states — Delaware, Oregon and Montana — allowed a limited form in connection with team parlay betting.

This left 46 states on the outside looking in, including New Jersey and several other states with casino interests that view themselves as being at an active disadvantage to Nevada-based casinos.

The first legal victory, surprisingly enough, went to to the feds, when a federal judge in February issued a permanent injunction against the New Jersey referendum results.  That decision left PASPA intact (at least temporarily), and led to the ongoing appeal by New Jersey officials.

New Jersey doesn’t stand alone in its battle against the DOJ and the major sports organizations.  The attorneys general of four other states – Virginia, Georgia, West Virginia, and Kansas — have filed a joint amici curiae (“friends of the court”) brief in support of New Jersey’s unconstitutionality and equal-sovereignty arguments.

While arguing that Nevada’s special status in regards to sportsbetting has little legal basis, these other attorneys general also made clear that their position was not related to the nature of sportsbetting itself, stating that they “take no position on the wisdom of the State and federal sports wagering laws at issue in this case.”

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Jamie Gold’s WSOP Bracelet Up for Auction

jamiegoldbraceletInterested in owning a World Series of Poker Main Event champion’s bracelet of your very own?  It just happens that there’s one up for auction, the 2006 bauble won by Jamie Gold.

Tales of Gold being down on his luck (and finances) have circulated in the poker world for several years now, with the auctions of the bracelet and a related Corum watch that appears to have been awarded to the chip leader at the ME final table seeming to confirm that Gold has exhausted the majority of his liquid assets.

Gold’s dominant and somewhat controversial run during the ’06 ME resulted in his winning the largest-ever poker prize in tournament history, $12 million, a mark that stood until Antonio Esfandiari’s $18.3 million win in last year’s OneDrop million-dollar entry affair.  The main event that Gold won, with 8,773 players, remains the largest in WSOP history.

For Gold, however, it was a star-crossed clash with destiny right from the start.  Tales of his pretensions included hiring a bodyguard, a hilarious frivolity among the crowds at the Rio, which featured dozens more famous poker players and Hollywood celebs alike.  Then, as soon as his win was in the books, word emerged that half of his $6 million prize was due to another player, Bruce Crispin Leyser, who had helped Gold fill WSOP seats for Bodog.

Leyser soon sued Gold, with an undisclosed settlement finally reached.

Gold’s reign as a WSOP champ was off to an ignoble start, and it didn’t improve from there.  More tales soon emerged, including evidence that his supposed career as a Hollywood talent agent was significantly enhanced.  Gold eventually did invest some of his winnings in a failed TV show concept called “Hottest Mom in America“.

In poker, Gold was a one-hit wonder.  His bluffing ways exposed to the WSOP TV cameras,  he was all but dead money in tournaments for the next couple of years, and he participated in a couple of episodes of “High Stakes Poker” with equally serio-comic results.  Much of those 2006 winnings went back into the poker economy, as happens with a lot of breakthrough winners.

Gold also made the least of his endorsement opportunities.  He signed on with Bodog after his win but was jettisoned several months later, and had a separate deal with Aced.com around 2009 that also lasted only a few months.

Which brings us to the auctions, of bracelet and watch both.  Gold is far from the first WSOP winner to fall upon much tougher times; he’s not even close to being the first to attempt to auction an ME bracelet to pay the bills.

Just a couple of months back, 2007 winner Jerry Yang’s bracelet and assorted other jewelry was auctioned off by the IRS to offset a tax lien, and 1991 winner Brad Daugherty’s bracelet has been offered on eBay on a couple of different occasions.  No doubt Hal Fowler’s bracelet, from his 1979 win, would also have been auctioned off in similar manner had eBay existed earlier.  And of course 2008 winner Peter Eastgate also auctioned his bracelet, but that one went for charity.

Click here for info on Jerry Yang’s jewelry auction

As for Gold’s bracelet, according to auctioneer Muvico, it offers “259 stones including over seven carats of diamonds and 120 grams of white and yellow gold. Rubies are inset to create the red of the heart and diamond suits, while a sapphire represents the spade and three black diamonds the clubs. The clasp is stamped 14K.”

Bidding begins in July, with the final bids accepted August 1-2 as part of a large sports-related auction at the Rosemont Center, north of O’Hare International outside Chicago.  As that’s only a half-hour drive for yours truly, I might even find time those days to check it out, just for curiosity’s sake.

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Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke Launch Spin Control Campaigns After Release of UB Tapes

not-meFormer UltimateBet owners and spokesplayers Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke are back in the news again, this time releasing separate statements last week regarding the decade-old cheating at UltimateBet.  The two statements deal with the complicity of several of Hellmuth’s and Duke’s business partners, including Russ Hamilton, Greg Pierson, Daniel Friedberg, Sanford Millar and others.

Those four were prominent participants in revealing recording regarding the UB cheating and coverup, which were secretly recorded by Hamilton himself with the assistance of his long-time computer expert, Travis Makar.

The statements by Hellmuth and Duke are quite similar is that they focus on Phil’s and Annie’s non-participation in the actual cheating, while continuing to obscure their own roles in promoting the company and accepting millions in ownership distributions — even after the extent of the cheating was discovered.

There is, of course, between actively cheating and simply acting in a craven and self-serving manner.  The latter, which the two prominent pros have demonstrated on numerous occasions over the years, is again on display in their respective statements, available here and here.

“Unfortunately, I made a horrible read regarding my relationship with the founders of the now defunct online poker site Ultimate Bet,” wrote Hellmuth’s spokesman for him, Poker Royalty’s Brian Balsbaugh.  ”I trusted their team and believed in their ability to run a first class website and business.”

The “their” is highlighted for being BS.  This was Hellmuth’s team as much as anyone, even if they hid the cheating from him.  Hellmuth himself was a founding investor in UltimateBet.  Here’s what Phil told CardPlayer five years ago, when he was elected to the Poker Hall of Fame:

“Then it was time to go into the Hall, and I was thrilled to have in attendance: my wife, my sister Molly, my dad (my mom had to leave), Iovation CEO Greg Pierson, UBT (Ultimate Blackjack Tour) CEO Russ Hamilton, Carl and Court Wescott, and my most trusted advisor Dan Friedberg (and his wife Reina). The above represent my best friends, and some of my family.”

As for Annie, same shit, different mouthpiece.  From her statement: “Knowing what I know today, I would have never encouraged anyone to play on the UltimateBet.com site under that management.”

Umm, this would be the same person that stayed on board representing UltimateBet even after its sale to Absolute Poker which she thereby declared, after meeting with “senior management,” was scandal free and was under new ownership as opposed to the University of Montana frat boys who were involved in that site’s own cheating and other shenanigans.  In other words, another line of crap.

She helped bring new poker players not to one crooked poker site, but two — and profited handsomely in the process.

Then she played a major role in the launch of the Epic Poker League, where she and Jeffrey Pollack and a couple of others paid themselves huge salaries while defrauding players out of a promised million-dollar freeroll.

That’s a helluva track record.

So remember that, when you think of Hellmuth and Duke.  They might be wealthy, but their wealth was derived from cheated funds, even if they didn’t actually participate in the cheating themselves.  That neither of them wants to acknowledge this, unfortunately, is on par with expectations.

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The Merge Network’s Partial Split

merge networkOne of the more interesting developments in recent weeks is the partial split underway at the Merge Network, where a small handful of related rooms all using the same Jazette cashier operation in Antigua have ring-fenced their cash-game players.

The rooms affected appear to include Sportsbook.com and PlayersOnly.com, which joined forces with Merge a couple of years back.

The changes include all cash-game action and sit-n-go (SNG) tourneys, although the affected Jazette sites are still playing along with other Merge players in MTTs, which include the latest iteration of the Poker Maximus series, which is ongoing at the network at the moment.

The partial split appears to have been sussed out by monitoring over at PokerScout, which tracks tables and lobby action and which noticed a traffic drop at Merge attributable to the cash-game split.

According to PokerScout, “There is no overlap between the two segments [Merge and Jazette] in the cash game tables at any stakes.”

The 20% decrease in traffic, according to PokerScout, appears to be roughly the proportion of Merge players that participate via the various Jazette sites.  A recent fuse report sites a number of Jazette-operate sportsbetting sites that also offered poker, though their total impact appears to be small; none of them were previously listed on the Merge Network’s own listing or member skins.  The larger Merge Network includes sites such as Carbon Poker and Aced.com

Those secondary Jazette brands include: 52bet.com, AllHorseRacing, All Star Horsebook, Betting Express, BetUSA, EZBets, Go Horse Betting, Super Sportsbook, Sport Fanatik, Only Winners, My Sportsbook, Linesmaker and Hollywood Sportsbook.

The PokerScout piece also inquires as to whether some component of the 20% drop at Merge might be attributable to a recent moderate rake hike at Merge, which was adapted quietly on May 1st and received scant press coverage.  Only a few reports on that rake increase exist, including a story at Merge competitor Bovada’s publicity face, CalvinAyre.com.

Merge’s increase affects the maximum amount that will be raked from any pot, affecting all but the largest stakes on the site.  It’s offset a bit by a 10% reduction in rake percentage on non-max-raked pots, but the net effect appears to be a higher net amount being raked by the site.  A network spokesman published brief tables comparing the new rake chart to the old.

New:

merge-rake-new

Old:

merge-rake-old

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TRO Lifted as PokerStars Loses Legal Scuffle in New Jersey Casino Purchase Attempt

Rational Group, the parent company, received a severe blow to it short-term plans to reenter the United States when a New Jersey judge lifted a temporary restraining order against Resorts International Holdings and the Atlantic Club Casino, which Rational had been in the process of purchasing since last December.

nj-postcardRational and PokerStars had sunk $11 million into the foundering Atlantic City property in recent months, only to see the Atlantic Club decline to extend the initial purchase terms, which included a final closing date in April of 2013.  Atlantic Club officials declared that they were unaware of “serious criminal activities” on behalf of PokerStars and its primary owners, principally Isai Scheinberg, who remains under indictment on Black Friday-related charges.

Rational’s attorneys filed for a TRO a couple of weeks ago, asserting that because of extensions in having their application as a casino operator delayed before being declared complete, the purchase should have been automatically extended under applicable New Jersey law.

That assertion was discarded in the ruling on Friday by a New Jersey Superior Court judge, leaving Stars and Rational with an expensive, uphill legal fight if they choose to continue the battle in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Atlantic Club officials praised the court’s decision in a brief statement which also talked of the casino’s looking forward to the new opportunities afforded by New Jersey’s recent expansion into online gaming.  Speculation abounds that Atlantic Club and RIH have found a new suitor for the property, which had been on the market for a couple of years at bargain-basement prices before Pokerstars and Rational attempted to snap it up.

Additional conjecture centers on the possibility of industry-related pressure being placed by the American Gaming Association on RIH, a non-AGA member.  The AGA launched a strident attack against the planned purchase by PokerStars earlier this year, even attempting to intervene in the New Jersey regulatory process.

In the event PokerStars gives up the purchase attempt, a final $4 million “termination fee” may still be due to RIH and the Atlantic Club, which when added to the $11 million already paid, equals the entire initial purchase price.

As usual, one of the most prescient legal insights into the current mess comes from lawyer Michael M. over at the CrAAKKer blog, who notes that PokerStars may have unwittingly placed itself into a legal tight spot with the attempted purchase, with Stars’ longer-term plans regarding the US the real casualty of recent weeks.  Michael’s “neutron bomb” theory makes for an interesting read.

This one took me a bit by surprise.  Having read the New Jersey statutes (with the usual IANAL disclaimer), I still thought Stars and Rational had a stronger legal argument, and that it wouldn’t be as easy as it appears to have been for the Atlantic Club to get the TRO lifted.  It remains to be seen if Stars will abandon the process, or re-engage in a state and process where the forces in play seem to be uniting against the company.

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Nevada Gaming Control Board Confirms Investigations Into iovation, Amaya Gaming

leggett

Paul Leggett, former front man for Absolute Poker

In a followup post to our last topic, concerning iovation being dropped by the new Nevada Ultimate Poker online poker site, Nevada Gaming Control Board officials have confirmed a pair of new investigations, into the Portland, Oregon firm iovation and Canadian gaming entity Amaya Gaming.

Iovation had already been dropped by Ultimate Poker when the GCB announced it would investigate the firm, first releasing information to the Las Vegas Review-Journal about widespread protests from players upon learning of iovation’s temporary involvement.

GCB board chairman A.G. Burnett, in communicating with LVRJ reporter Howard Stutz, confirmed that iovation had been voluntarily dropped by Ultimate Poker, which is in the middle of a 30-day trial run.

“This is in the category of where the ultimate responsibility rests upon the licensee (Ultimate Gaming), and I know that they are addressing the issue,” Burnett told Stutz and the LVRJ. “We, in turn, will analyze what we received back from Ultimate, and then decide how to proceed from here.

The GCB has two new suitability investigations to handle.  Burnett, in a separate e-mail to pokerfuse editor Michael Gentile, also confirmed a similar investigation into Amaya Gaming and its newly hired head of online gaming, Paul Leggett.

Yes, that Leggett — the former CEO/COO of Absolute Poker, UB.com, Tokwiro Enterprises, and a couple of other shady corporate entities that were all parts of the Cereus Network, which dissolved after Black Friday, leaving tens of millions of dollars in player bankrolls unrefunded and almost certainly gone for good.

Leggett was quietly brought on by Amaya, which has acquired both the Ongame and Cryptologic networks, and has a particular interest in marketing the Ongame platform toward some of the Nevada casinos to which it and partner SHFL (ShuffleMaster) have reached agreements.

It’s also hard for Amaya to claim they didn’t know about Leggett’s past; they haven’t issued any sort of press release about his hiring, which in itself suggests they were trying to keep this one well under the radar.

That didn’t happen, and several players immediately brought Leggett’s pending presence in the Nevada market to the attention of the GCB.  “While we are not currently conducting an investigation with a specific view toward disciplinary action,” Burnett told Pokerfuse, “we do place a high burden upon our licensees to ensure proper due diligence has been conducted and that the State of Nevada and its gaming patrons are protected.“

Pierson was a participant in the recently released Russ Hamilton tapes being pored over by yours truly and others, while Leggett is mentioned frequently in those as well, having headed up the investigation / coverup from the AP side.  That both Pierson and Leggett emerged with possible ties to the Nevada online market in recent days is equal parts ironic and disgusting.

Nonetheless, it appears the public outcry over the pair is likely to have a very real effect. Don’t be surprised if Amaya quietly dumps Leggett just as speedily as he was brought on board; the guy’s on record as stating he wouldn’t even enter the United States, for fear of a sealed indictment waiting for him.

You can continue to get your poker fix at Betonline.com – start now!

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Iovation Gets a Quick Boot From Nevada Online Scene

It didn’t take long for a public outcry to have an effect in Nevada, where iovation, the online-security company born from the stolen monies of UltimateBet, was quickly by jettisoned by Ultimate Poker,the first fully licensed Nevada online poker site.  As always, we’d like to make clear that these are separate entities, despite both companies’ use of the word “Ultimate”.

Iovation’s tour of duty in Nevada, which was about eight weeks shorter than the 1980′s run of “Delta House” on ABC, came to an abrupt end when Ultimate Poker parent Fertitta Interactive issued a public statement confirming a massive player protest about iovation’s involvement with the site.

Iovation, it turned out, had been subcontracted by CAMS/Verifi (itself a third-party vendor of support services) to provide additional player- and machine- identification services to Ultimate Poker.

iovation-angel-devilIovation’s main product, called ieSnare, was born out of UltimateBet’s early struggles to combat credit-card fraud, and proved so successful that the software was marketed to dozens of other online gambling sites.  As a result, iovation (first known as ieLogic) built a huge relational database linking suspect people with their computers and associated devices, each of which carry distinctive identifiers (including MAC address designations) that allow users to be traced against their knowledge or will.

That such a product and such a database of illicitly obtained information is in the hands of someone like Greg Pierson and iovation is, of course, a much deeper topic.

But they didn’t last long in Nevada.  Ultimate Poker pulled the plug on them on Friday, without specifying whether or not they had also terminated the CAMS/Verifi relationship.  It was really CAMS/Verifi’s responsibility, since they has recently announced a partnership deal with iovation, to assure the firm’s suitability.

Nonetheless, as the primary operator, Ultimate Poker also bears significant for the lack of proper vetting; even a cursory examination would have shown that a firm as intrinsically tied to UltimateBet as iovation was would not only be unfit for Nevada online poker, but would probably be automatically blacklisted under the state’s five-year “bad actor” blackout provisions.

Read up more on How Ultimate Poker went Live in Nevada

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Crockfords Fires Back at Phil Ivey, Alleges Angle Shot Involving Card Defects

ScreenHunter_01 Dec. 16 11.54The case of the disputed ₤7.8 million ($12.1 million) punto banco win logged by Phil Ivey last August at the Crockfords casino in London’s tony Mayfair district is back in the news today, with the latest development emerging via a Daily Mail piece alleging that Ivey took advantage of improperly cut playing cards to log his win.

With a caveat here that the Daily Mail is England’s version of the National Enquirer, or in a more poker-centric sense, Gambling911, the piece is still interesting in that it cites unnamed Crockfords officials and likely outlines the strategy that Crockfords will use in defending itself against Ivey’s recent suit.

Head to Bovada.lv to play your favorite game online now!

To rehash the boring details, Ivey and an unnamed female companion, referred to only as a Las Vegas resident with Asian features, logged the big win last August after Ivey successfully asked for the table stakes to be upped from the house max of ₤50,000 to ₤150,000.  Over two nights, he then went on a suspicious rush, turning an initial ₤500,000 loss into the ₤7.8 million win.

Ivey filed his suit only after many months of apparent legal wrangling between he and the casino, with the disputed winnings first becoming public knowledge last October.  Crockfords returned Ivey’s initial ₤1 million stake almost immediately, but withheld the amount of Ivey’s win, instead informing the United Kingdom’s gambling control board that it was investigating Ivey’s win.

Reports about the situation over the last several months were uniform in declaring that Crockfords’ own investigation had uncovered no cheating, which makes the weekend’s story that much more surprising.  The punto banco (a version of baccarat) that Ivey played prevents the players themselves from touching the cards, and the casino in reviewing security tapes was convinced employees did not willfully collude with Ivey.

The Daily Mail piece paints a somewhat different picture alleging that Ivey and his companion noticed that Crockfords was using playing cards with security flaws — a full-bleed card design incorporating a geometric pattern.  When cut incorrectly, this type of design looks different from one end to the other, or from one side to the other, when viewing the backs.

Ivey and his companion are then alleged to have asked the dealer to rotate some of the cards before returning them to the discard pile, out of “superstition”.  The story implies that they asked this be done to the eights and nines, valuable cards in punto banco which would have then stood out from the rest of the deck (or shoe of decks) on subsequent deals.

The Daily Mail also alleges that Ivey’s companion had been thrown out of other casinos for being part of the same “scam” elsewhere.

There are a whole lot of questions that the Mail’s account raises, but either ignores or chooses not to address, including:

  • Why did Crockfords employ such a card design in its ultra-high-stakes card games?  Full-bleed, geometric card designs are a very basic no-no in the business for exactly this reason,  ranking at about a 12 on a 1-to-10 scale of card-deck security gaffes.  I wouldn’t use a deck like this in a $100 private poker tournament; hearing of it in a casino with tables stakes of ₤150,000 is patently ridiculous.
  • Why did they allow the dealers to rotate the cards at Ivey’s whim?  If true, and given that Ivey immediately both raised the stakes and converted a losing session to a heater at the same time, should have drawn immediate attention and intervention.
  • Why did previous reports of examination of Crockfords’ security tapes not mention any of this?  Even given Crockfords stupidity, all this stuff should have been immediately apparent on an initial review of the security footage.

It’s almost as if the casino freerolled Ivey; both sides may have been angle-shooting the other, with the casino perhaps aware of the issue and never planning to pay out the win from day one.

Which doesn’t make Ivey a saint, either.  The story as portrayed by the Daily Mail makes this appear to be a pre-planned scheme by Ivey and his companion, establishing Ivey as a high-roller in the game, losing some serious money, before upping the stakes and putting this plan into action.

Discussion forums are sharply divided this morning on whether — assuming the new allegations are true — as to whether this is cheating by Ivey or not.  It’s not a form of card counting so much as it is a form of card-identfying, which did (if true) provide an unfair advantage in the game.  It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens if this goes to trial.  While it would be hard to brand Ivey as a “cheat” in the legal sense, a court could very easily decide that such actions were a deliberate attempt to usurp the implied odds of the game, thereby violating its rules, and allow Crockfords to retain the winnings.

In any event, he won’t be returning there soon, and it’s a safe bet that all casinos will be watching him a little closer in the future.

Oh, about that Daily Mail reputation.  Click this link to go to Dan & Dan’s “The Daily Mail Song” on YouTube.  It’ll be the best three minutes you spend all day.

ScreenHunter_05 May. 13 13.46

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Travis Makar Releases UltimateBet Audio Tapes, Involvement of UB Execs Detailed

UB founding exec Russ Hamilton getting in on the action.

UB principal cheater Russ Hamilton barely knew what to do without “AuditMonster” at his fingertips.

In a surprise move, years after the cheating on UltimateBet, Travis Makar has publicly released a large cache of files, including two lengthy recordings allegedly made by Russ Hamilton himself that detail how the cheating took place, and how the company’s executives, including Greg Pierson, worked together to orchestrate as much of a coverup as the facts would allow.

Hundreds of people, including yours truly, downloaded the files from publicly available links posted by Makar, who for years served as Hamilton’s personal computer expert.  Makar has previously released brief snippets from his audio tapes, which came from a computer of Hamilton’s that was left in Makar’s possession.

According to his own previous accounts, Makar assisted Hamilton in making the recordings, which appear to have been made at various times in 2008, when the UB insider cheating scandal first came public.

Numerous excerpts and brief quotes have already emerged from the more than five hours of audio released; this writer, a longtime investigator into the UltimateBet and Absolute Poker scandals, is one of dozens of people who have been posting quotes from the recordings on forums,in blogs, and on social networks.

Among the many revelations emerging in the first 24 hours:

UltimateBet (and current iovation CEO) Greg Pierson is recorded as wanting to “bound” (cap) the amount of refunds to be paid to cheated victims at $5 million, regardless of the amount actually stolen;

Pierson and UB general counsel Daniel Friedberg float a plan about blaming the cheating on   a “consultant” who “hacked into the system,” complete with discussions about how Hamilton might have to be included on the list of victims who were to be repaid;

Hamilton bragged about a Interpol connection — possibly via Excapsa board member Norman Inkster, a retired Interpol chief — which supposedly allowed him access to e-mails of any person in the world going back two years.  The information was to be used to help stifle some of the expected refund requests;

Hamilton declared that he even paid income taxes on some $5.2 million in funds derived from the cheating that he cashed out from the site.

Several of the victims of the cheating at UltimateBet’s high-stakes games are specifically identified on the tape, including Prahlad Friedman (“Mahatma”), Mike Fosco (“trambopoline”), Mike Matusow, Scott Matusow and Robert Williamson III.  Two others with UB connections, Freddy Deeb and Fred David, were also listed as cheating victims a list of players discussed in one of the recordings, which involved a panicked Portland meeting between Hamilton, Pierson, Freidberg and another UB attorney, Sanford Millar.

The UB execs also discussed ways to not pay some of the victims as shown in an initial internal investigation, including Deeb, David and actor Ben Affleck, who Pierson alleged at one point had a half-million-dollar unpaid marker and/or line of credit with the site.

There will be much more on these tapes in the days ahead, which probably has the people at Lock Poker rejoicing, as it’s temporarily knocked that struggling site’s problems off the top line of most poker news feeds.

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