Executives at Atlantic City Borgata Say Huge Losses at the Tables Are Not Related to Casino Cheating...What Do I Think?

Here's an Atlantic City Press article about the huge casino table losses suffered in recent months by Atlantic City's Borgata Casino and Spa.

Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa’s gamblers have been incredibly lucky at the gaming tables. That’s good for them, but bad for Borgata.

Borgata’s luck has been so poor lately that it has cost Atlantic City’s top-grossing casino millions of dollars in revenue and prompted some intriguing speculation. One gaming analyst wondered about the possibility of a cheating ring.

“Do you think there’s some sort of collusion or do you have some sort of cheating going on, or is it just a change in consumer behavior?” Adam Steinberg, of Merriman Capital, bluntly asked during a conference call last week on Borgata’s third-quarter earnings report.

Steinberg posed the question after executives at Borgata’s parent company, Boyd Gaming Corp., complained that the casino took a $9 million revenue hit during the quarter because of its unusually low table games hold percentage.

Keith Smith, Boyd’s president and chief executive officer, responded that Borgata officials checked things out “to ensure that there is nothing wrong with the game.”

“We can assure you everything is fine,” Smith said. “We’ve done all of the diligence and looked at it. I think it is a function of luck. It happens in our business, where you can run for a number of months with a low hold.”

In the third quarter, Borgata’s net revenue shrank to $207.7 million, a nearly 7 percent decline from $222.6 million a year ago. Even worse, gross operating profits plunged 19.7 percent to $54.3 million for the quarter, the company reported.

“The most significant factor impacting Borgata’s results was lower table games revenue, which was largely a function of unusually lucky play by our customers,” said Paul Chakmak, Boyd’s chief operating officer. “Had we experienced historical table games hold, we estimate revenue would have been $9 million higher during the quarter.”

The “hold percentage” is the term for the ratio of gaming chips the casino keeps compared with the number it sells to gamblers. For example, if a blackjack player buys $200 in chips and loses $30 in bets, the hold percentage for the casino is 15 percent.

Borgata’s table games hold in the third quarter this year was 12.09 percent, more than 2 percent lower than its average of 14.34 percent from 2005 to 2009, according to figures released by the casino. The hold was 13.77 percent in the second quarter this year and 13.62 percent in the first, also below historic levels.

“The hold is not limited to one area of the casino. It’s kind of throughout the table games area,” said Josh Hirsberg, Boyd’s chief financial officer. “It’s not throughout the market, either, so there’s something unique at Borgata at this point.”

Dave Coskey, Borgata’s vice president of marketing, said the casino conducted an internal review in September and found no irregularities with the table games. For security reasons, he would not divulge the exact nature of the checks.

“As a responsible gaming company, typically, we’ll examine and review our procedures and controls whenever there is a variance in any phase of our operation,” Coskey said in an e-mail statement. “That kind of examination isn’t unusual — it’s a part of our business and just one of the ways that we verify the integrity of our operation.”

In the end, Borgata officials concluded that gamblers simply had a hot streak.

“We’ve always said that Borgata can be your lucky place. Our customers proved that during this month,” Coskey said.

While security checks this time did not uncover anything wrong, Borgata has not been immune to illicit gambling. In 2007, authorities broke up an illegal sports-betting operation that had been run out of Borgata’s high-stakes poker room. Authorities praised the casino for its cooperation in helping them to crack the betting ring.

My Take: Well, the Borgata, as we all know, has been the locale of some high-profile poker cheat and illegal-betting cheat scams, so we can't rule out something "cheaty" going on here now. If there indeed is organized cheating going on, whether or not it may involve Borgata personnel, I would bet every nickel that it's got something to do with the casino's high-stakes baccarat tables, which are the usual suspects these days in major continuous brick and mortar casino cheat operations.

So, I'd say it's fifty-fifty that at least some big time cheating is happening at the Borgata casino.

Straight Collusion Play Continues to Dominate Cheating in Brick and Mortar Poker World

I recently released the latest statistics for how online poker cheating breaks down in percentages, in which poker-bot cheat-play is gaining ground on plain old collusion-play at the online tables.

In the brick and mortar poker cheat world, however, simple collusion play continues to dominate poker cheating and will probably keep dominating it for years, if not decades, to come. Poker cheating via card-marking is gaining steadily as new laser techniques for marking the cards are being introduced and constantly improved. The simple reason for collusion-cheating poker-play dominance in the poker cheat world is that the protaganists involved can never be prosecuted because it is impossible to prove, and even if it were possible to prove, it really doesn't constitute a crime anyway.

Here are the numbers of the poker cheat percentage pie.

Collusion cheating 72%
Card marking 15%
Card mucking and switching 8%
Pot cheating and stealing chips 5%

I was surprised that pot cheating and stealing, which comprises poker cheats trying to short poker pots or steal chips from other players' stacks, only accounts for five percent of the brick and mortar poker-cheat pie. But these are the figures I am getting.

To review my latest online poker cheating figures, click here.

Full Tilt Poker Taking Over Front Line in War Against Online Bot Cheats!

Full Tilt Poker, the second biggest online poker site, is really laying out its artillery against the online poker bot cheats. They have begun confiscating funds from suspected poker cheat accounts and then closing these accounts down. I have been blogging about the advances made by poker bot programmers and how bots are getting a bigger piece of the overall online poker cheat pie. These bot programmers are making rapid and constant improvements to the bots' artificial intelligence, and the overall poker bot population cheating online poker is on the steady rise. Ever since the Chinese poker bot cheating ring was exposed on PokerStars a few months back, the entire online poker industry has been trying to stepup its defense against bot-player online poker cheats.

Security personnel at Full Tilt Poker has identified a company that is purportedly selling quality bots online. It is called Shanky Technologies, and it does sound kind of "shanky" to me...if not shady. In any case, several online poker room security departments are investigating this company to see just how far it is involved in the online poker cheating market.

Full Tilt issued this statement to the world media: "For a number of reasons, we are unable to provide additional information regarding this case, including the players involved and the game type where it occurred."

Although that statement seems to say nothing, I believe that Full Tilt is no longer turning its head to the bot cheats. I think they really want to fight them man-to...bot...and win this war.

Can they?

No. but they can win a few battles and slow them down from time to time.

Blanca Games Responds to New Online Poker Cheating Scandal

Source: Poker News Daily

"In September, a letter from XMT Liquidations to the shareholders of what was formerly known as Excapsa Software identified a new cheating incident on the former Ultimate Bet site. Recently, Blanca Games, the current owners of UB.com and Absolute Poker, addressed the findings and the dispute between Tokwiro Enterprises and Excapsa.

The letter, dated September 10th, references an “an unfair and unlawful advantage in online poker games in 2004 and 2005.” However, the incident was not outlined. Blanca Games shed some light on the issue last week, explaining, “The Liquidator has recently advised Blanca’s employees that the security breach at issue was closed by Excapsa in early 2005. Blanca has no knowledge of whether or not this incident is, in fact, ‘newly discovered.’ It does, however, understand that two player accounts were involved in this 2004 incident, and that the damages sustained by players were less than $100,000.” The incident was then reported to the “appropriate regulatory authorities.”

Blanca Games clarified, however, that the liquidators in question were not acting on Absolute Poker or UB.com, which together make up the USA-friendly CEREUS Network. Additionally, the press release from Blanca asserted, “The operations of the AbsolutePoker.com and UB.com sites, now under the management of Blanca, are entirely unaffected by the events referred to by the Liquidator… In short, the 2004 incident has no impact whatsoever on current players and customers of AbsolutePoker.com or UB.com. Blanca will continue to do everything in its power to protect its players and customers by providing the highest levels of security on its sites.”

The cheating scandals on Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were profiled in a “60 Minutes” piece in November 2008. Two months ago, Blanca Games acquired the CEREUS Network from Tokwiro Enterprises. Blanca Games is based in Antigua and has headquarters in Costa Rica, where UB.com and Absolute Poker are both located. Stuart Gordon serves as the company’s CEO.

Blast Off was comprised of the assets of Ultimate Bet before it was sold to Tokwiro Enterprises and the liquidation at hand saw one of its major creditors elect “to exercise its rights in respect of the collateral it held as security for Blast Off’s debt.” This “major creditor” may refer to the former owners of the Absolute Poker domain, although the event was not addressed in Blanca Games’ letter.

The liquidation letter added, “Blast Off intended to [end] any and all operations related to assets over which Excapsa has been granted a security interest.” This could potentially refer to UltimateBet.com, which was not included in the transfer to Blanca Games. Instead, only UB.com and AbsolutePoker.com became part of the new company. Now, UltimateBet.com forwards to an online poker affiliate site and is not associated with UB.com.

Blanca noted that the company has “no interest in that dispute” between XMT Liquidations and Tokwiro Enterprises.

In response to the press release from Blanca Games, one poster on TwoPlusTwo noted, “Further evidence as to why this industry needs to be regulated and have oversight.” The Kahnawake Gaming Commission cited Russ Hamilton as the main person responsible for the cheating scandal that erupted on Ultimate Bet. The former World Series of Poker Main Event champion is still roaming free in Las Vegas much to the dismay of many and over $20 million was stolen from players.

In a blog posted from August, UB.com pro Joe Sebok lamented the lack of persecution in the cheating scandal: “I wish we were a police force, but we are not. I wish we could really round up all of these people and interrogate them, but we can’t… I also wish we were a court and we could try them all and jail the convicted, but again, we cannot do this. The poker community would be a better place if we could, but as of right now this just isn’t possible.”

In February 2009, Raw Vegas caught up with Hamilton in the parking lot of a Las Vegas golf course. Poker pro Layne Flack and two other unidentified people were with Hamilton at the time. Hamilton refused comment and drove away."

No, Virginia, Online Roulette is Not Rigged to Cheat You

Funny thing. I got three emails this week asking me if online roulette is rigged to cheat because all three people lost money playing online roulette. And one of the askers was named, of all names, Virginia. My response to Virginia was:

No, Virginia, online roulette is not rigged...that means in general. Like in all walks and runs in life, online casino sites have their bad apples. Some online casinos, a very small percentage of them, do cheat the players. But this cheating is not usually carried out by software that rigs the percentages against players. The online casinos that cheat generally do so at their cages. This is when you try and cash out and there's no cash waiting for you. In other words, you are the victim of fly-by-night casino, and that means that the entire casino was a scam and was set-up strictly to fleece all the player accounts opened up with it.

My advice to anyone worried about the integrity of online casinos is simply to play with established ones. You can keep current on the safest and most honest online casinos by following my SAFEST ONLINE CASINO CHEAT RANKINGS. The casinos listed here will not give you any such problems.

Full Tilt Poker Bans Cheats Using Bots!...Should We Laugh?

Well, what are they supposed to do...invite them to play? Come on, man, gimme a break. I guess in their emails to suspected or alleged poker bot cheats, they said something like "We are sorry but we are banning you for using a bot to cheat our online poker games..."

In any event, you can read a full article on this at Poker News Daily.

"Full Tilt Poker, the world’s second largest online poker room, sent an e-mail to an unknown number of recipients last week regarding the measures being taken to improve its security, according to PokerTableRatings and other outlets. The e-mail informed players that the site had completed an investigation that found several users in violations of Full Tilt‘s Terms of Service, some of whom were discovered cheating through the use of bots.

Each cheater had their account shut down and all of their funds were confiscated. Additional details of the incidents remain minimal, as Full Tilt didn’t disclose the number of accounts that were shut down or how much was seized, but the site promised that any players affected by the cheaters would be reimbursed for their losses.

“For a number of reasons, we are unable to provide additional information regarding this case, including the players involved and the game type where it occurred,” Full Tilt Poker said in the e-mail. The online poker site’s investigation exposed a software release by Shanky Technologies, who owns and operates a website that sells bots for a variety of different games, including No Limit Hold’em, Omaha, and even blackjack. Shanky Technologies apologized to its customers and said that Full Tilt had “quite suddenly and without warning froze all the accounts… although it tolerated the presence of bots all this time.”

A poker bot, for those unaware, is a form of software that registers for games and multi-tables without the assistance of a user. They’re mostly used in cash games, but have also been found in sit and gos, where the software uses Nash Equilibrium and an ICM calculator to make optimal moves against opponents. Most of the major online poker rooms have made concentrated attempts to prevent the use of such software. In July, PokerStars cracked down on a bot ring based in China that had played at least eight million hands and earned $57,000 at Double or Nothing sit and gos.

Full Tilt has also been in the news involving bot use in the past. In October 2009, two customers who had their accounts frozen because Full Tilt believed they were using bots sued the site. Lary “pokergirl z” Kennedy and Greg Omotoy filed their complaint on October 1st and levied accusations of fraud, libel, slander, false advertising, and racketeering against the online poker room after having more than $80,000 confiscated.

The suit accused Full Tilt pros Chris Ferguson and Andy Bloch of creating bots to populate slow cash game tables on the site and increase the profits of the company. Full Tilt responded to Kennedy’s lawsuit by claiming the suit was baseless and stated that it “has never knowingly allowed ‘bots’ to play on its site.” The case went to the United States District Court for the Central District of California in April, but it was dismissed by Judge Margaret Morrow, who stated that Kennedy had failed to “detail many portions of her case regarding state violations and, in particular, there could be no claim under the RICO Act.'"

Online Poker Cheat Collusion Victim Brings Lawsuit Against Six Well-Known Online Poker Players in Bizarre Case!

Source: onlinepoker.net

A Florida resident by the name of Scott Crespo has made the headlines recently, after filing a complaint on the 12th October against six well-known online pros at the US Northern District Court of Illinois.

In his lawsuit he is attempting to recover “illegal poker gambling losses” while accusing the players, amongst other things, of colluding with each other and cheating opponents on the internet.

Scott Crespo is seeking to recover triple the amount lost to the group incurred over approximately 700 tournaments on major US sites, and the names of the players cited in his filing have raised a few eye-brows as it includes a talented group of pros.

The six players named in the lawsuit include;

1; Faraz “The-Toilet” Jaka with over $2 million in online winnings and $2.3 million from live events

2; Andy “BKice” Seth with $2.182 million in online winnings and $1.14 million from live events

3; Benjamin “Chong94” LeFew with $895,000 in online winnings and $82,000 from live events

4; Mohsin “chicagocards1” Charania with $3.3 million in online winnings and $273,000 from live events

5; Ravi “govshark2” Raghavan with $2.73 million in online winnings and $290,000 from live events

6; Tyler “puffinmypurp” Reiman with $2.9 million in online winnings and $1.9 million from live events.

At the heart of Scott Crespo’s complaint is the players formation of a group called PokerHaus, which has its own website and is located at 1103 S. Busey Ave, Urbana on the campus of the University of Illinois. Scott Crespo’s complaint alleges that the six defendants used “real estate or property for the purposes of gambling” in the form of Pokerhaus. He also accuses them of having “actively recruited other individuals to participate in illegal gambling activity” and “committed acts of collusion and cheating while playing online poker.”

As this bizarre case gets going, apparently the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) are already considering throwing their weight behind the accused players. I will continue to bring you updates to this story as they occur.

My take: Well, in spite of the Poker Players' Alliance support for the accused, I think this guy Crespo has got a case. God for their jugulars, Scotty!

UltimateBet Victim Tom Dwan Compensated $300k After Online Poker Cheating Scandal

Source: onlinepoker.net

Tom Dwan has received $300,000 in compensation related to the superuser cheating scandal which took place at Ultimate Bet between January 2005 and December 2007.

Tom “durrrr” Dwan started playing at Full Tilt in early 2007, eventually becoming a sponsored pro at the site in November 2007. However, before then one of the other poker rooms the online prodigy had played at included Ultimate Bet while it was in the midst of its infamous superuser scandal.

Just to recap, following his 1994 WSOP Main Event win Russ Hamilton worked as a consultant for Ultimate Bet. He then went on to organise a scam which allowed himself and a team to view their opponents’ hole cards, eventually cheating customers out of around $22 million.

It would now appear that Tom Dwan was one of those unfortunate players to have been scammed and so received the $300,000 refund from Ultimate Bet by means of compensation. Recalling the exact session which led to him dropping around 20 buy-ins at $50/$100 PLO, Dwan said; “I guessed there was a 2% or 3% of some cheating going on.” However, his good friend and fellow pro David Benefield said he believed during that session the cheating percentage was probably nearer to 10%.

Tom Dwan then went on to recall losing the 20 buy-ins to a player who seemed to be playing an absolutely crazy game at the time. However, Dwan has since been unable to recollect the player’s onscreen name and is convinced it didn’t appear on the list of superusers later produced by Ultimate Bet. Dwan said that particular session created the biggest impression on him while playing at the site, but conceded that “nothing else the whole time peeked my interest about UB at all.”

Tom Dwan’s $300,000 compensation represented just a small fraction of the $22,100,000 eventually refunded to the defrauded players. But I believe it is the largest to date.

Poker Bot Use Catching Up To Collusion Play With Online Poker Cheats

AS we move deeper and deeper into the online poker era, the online poker cheats are continuing to adjust their cheating ways and develop new methods of trying to cheat you at the online poker tables. During the first few years of online poker, the cheating was dominated by simple collusion play, sometimes by two online cheats and others by groups, some of which consisted of eight or nine players taking down one single cheat victim. As the technological advances enabled the development of more sophisticated poker bots with artificial intelligence, their use naturally progressed with the progress (pardon the pun). And just as naturally, the colluders and the botters in many cases joined forces to form monster online poker cheat teams that used their bots in collusion to get your money. For purposes of this report, I am going to break down the current online poker cheating methods into both individual and combined methods to give you an idea of just how much of which form of cheating you're either up against...or participating in.

As of October 15, 2010

Percentage of online poker cheats playing collusion only: 42%
Percentage of online poker cheats using bots only: 29%
Percentage of online poker cheats playing collusion with bots: 21%
Percentage of online poker cheats hacking and stealing info: 8%
(this includes hole-card compromising operations)

Note that this study reflects all online poker games including tournaments.

Singapore Casino Cheating Beat Goes On. Pair Face Nearly 100 Casino Cheating Felonies!

Hold on! Don't get too excited reading this. It all boils down to two guys ripping off Resorts World Sentosa Casino for thirty grand by stealing chips off tables and cheating at roulette. One of the accused cheats, a twenty-three year-old Malaysian dealer named Ng Wuey Kiang, supposedly controlled the roulette wheel by making soft spins that would make the spinning ball land on his cohort's numbers more often than fair probability would dictate. That cohort has been identified as thirty-nine year-old Chinese national Leong Teck Leong. Leong is accused of corrupting Kiang into cheating his casino from the inside, by both stealing chips and manipulating the spins on roulette wheels. I can't say how efficient Kiang was at controlling the roulette ball. This is very hard to do unless the dealer makes obvious weak spins with few revolutions of the ball.

The total of the thefts of casino chips was roughly $1,500 and was carried out on seven or eight occasions, according to Resorts World Sentosa personnel. The roulette cheat moves garnered from $175 to $1,750 a pop. All this has added up to nearly one hundred charges, and the bails on both cheats are steep. Leong is being held on $70,000 bail, Ng $100,000. Pre-trial is set for December 2. Both men face several years in prison.

My take: The sheer audacity of these casino cheats working Singapore really strikes me. None of these cheats appear to be even close to good or professional...So, what does that say about the surveillance and securtiy forces of both Singapore casinos?...Not much.