A recent sighting of 1994 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event winner Russ Hamilton in a Florida poker room and a verbal altercation at the tables have sparked the ire of the poker community once again.
A poster on the TwoPlusTwo forum named “Slifdog” detailed a trip to Gulfstream Park’s $5/$10/$20 No Limit Hold’em tables on Tuesday evening. Slifdog and a friend allegedly sat down on each side of a player with “well over $10K” in front of him, only to realize that the mystery man was the alleged mastermind of the Ultimate Bet scandal, Hamilton. From that point, Slifdog and his partner decided to take a few potshots at Hamilton.
According to Slifdog, his partner dug into Hamilton about how he is “karmically screwed” over his actions at Ultimate Bet before the duo administered their coup de grace that set him off. After Slifdog bluffed the former WSOP Main Event titleholder in a hand, his friend commented, “(It’s) a tougher game when you cannot see your opponents cards.” Then, Hamilton erupted in fury.
“You are a f***ing d*ck… a f***ing d*ck,” Slifdog quoted Hamilton as saying. “If you believe everything you read, you are just stupid, just a stupid f***ing d*ck. You do not know what you are talking about; you were not there. You just read about it and think you know.” Soon after this tirade, the floor tried to gain control of the situation, which only seemed to prolong the disagreement.
Slifdog reported that the floor man, apparently in response to Hamilton’s status at the betting windows and on the felt of the Gulfstream Park facilities, came to the table and “[asked] Billy to stop tormenting this lard a**. Billy says loud so that most of the room can hear, ‘You let cheaters play here and then you make me stop talking when he screams at me?’ The floor says that Billy is going to have to leave if he does not settle down and Billy responds, ‘I don’t want to play anywhere that caters to this type of cheating scum.’ We pack up our chips and leave.”
Poker pro Jonathan “FatalError” Aguiar, who apparently was at Gulfstream as well on the night in question, confirmed the incident. On his Twitter account, Aguiar chirped, “Playing PLO in a Florida casino and Russ Hamilton is here walking around!” Several of Aguiar’s followers responded to his Tweet, including 2010 WSOP Player of the Year Frank Kassela, who added his insight regarding Hamilton: “You gotta be brave.”
Hamilton masterminded the $20+ million cheating scheme on Ultimate Bet and used a superuser program to empty the bankrolls of hundreds of players like top pros Brad “Yukon” Booth and Prahlad Friedman. The latter is now a sponsored pro of UB.com, which was formerly Ultimate Bet.
The resulting outrage over the involvement of Hamilton has earned him the scorn of the poker world. Because of the unregulated nature of the online poker industry, no charges were filed in any jurisdiction that could hear the case. Hamilton himself was excluded from the 2009 WSOP Champions Invitational, which featured all of the living WSOP Main Event champions, and the scandals on Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were chronicled in a feature on the CBS news program “60 Minutes.”
Not unexpectedly, the forums were overwhelmingly against Hamilton regarding the events of Tuesday night. On PocketFives.com, poster “iamthedeck ftw” said, “LOL well played. Can’t even believe this scumbag shows his face at a poker table still.”
At TwoPlusTwo, a ten-page thread had developed by this morning, once again with many the comments praising the duo for their efforts in Florida. Poster “Jetto” perhaps summed up the situation when he commented, “Thing is the guy is still out and about and many people still respect him. You could score one for the good guys. But he scored big against many.”
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