Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke Quit UB.com...No Wonder Why...

Right after Annie Duke ended her association with UB.com, formerly UltimateBet.com, the online poker site on which played out the biggest cheating scandal in history (in both online poker and brick and mortar poker), UB.com has announced that Phil Hellmuth as well will be disassociating himself from the former cheating online poker site.

On the UB.com blog: "Today we are announcing that UB.com and Phil Hellmuth have mutually parted ways. It has been great working with Phil over the last decade and we know we’re with the rest of the poker world when we say that we look forward to Phil's next move on the world poker circuit."

Poker pro Joe Sebok, the UB.com PR man, wrote on his blog about this big double-departure and even suggested that more changes will occur at UB.com.

Sebok's words: "Phil and Annie have been the face of the company for years now, and we thank them for their unbelievable contributions and bid them the utmost in success moving forward. With that said, we look forward to 2011, and I believe it will be the finest year that we have ever had at UB. Speaking of Team UB, while it’s true that two of our members have moved on, don’t think that we aren’t restocking the talent. We’ll be announcing our newest Team UB member next week and I am crazily pumped about it. UB has, and will continue to have, a whole new look and feel for our team and our newest signing exemplifies that, so stay tuned for that announcement next week."

My take: Sebok is simply doing his job "pumping up" the what's-to-be's at UB.com. As for Duke and Hellmuth, they simply decided that being associated with UB.com can never escape the online poker cheating stench of UltimateBet.com and Russ Hamilton, the cheating scam's mastermind, so they cut the cord.

Probably the best for both of them.

Nine Casino Cheats Including Three Dealers Go Down in Milwaukee Casino Bingo Scam!

Source: jsonline.com

Nine people, including three former casino employees, have pleaded guilty in federal court to cheating Potawatomi Bingo and Casino in Milwaukee out of thousands of dollars by rigging the Pick 8 bingo game.

About $160,000 was stolen in 2005 and 2006 through a simple scheme organized by casino employee Deandre Russell, according to court documents.
Russell is facing about two years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines when he is sentenced next year by U.S. District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller. The other defendants, who admitted helping Russell in the scheme, face less time because the amount each stole was less than Russell's total take, according to their plea agreements.

After the casino learned of the theft, officials made changes, Potawatomi casino spokesman Ryan Amundson said. "It is important to ensure the integrity of our games," Amundson said. "Immediately following the incident, procedures were put in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening again."

Amundson said he was unable to talk about what the changes were. He also said he could not confirm when Russell worked at the casino. Court documents indicate Russell worked at the casino in 2005 and 2006 on the bingo floor. Two other people who had worked at the casino, Gloria M. Rivas-Santiago and Esmeralda L. Fuentez, pleaded guilty to running a scheme they said they learned from Russell.

Russell's attorney did not return a call for comment.

According to the plea agreement:

Russell devised the scheme to fix the Pick 8 bingo game so his associates would win and split the money with him.

In the Pick 8 game, players would buy a card with carbon paper on the back, write down eight numbers and then drop the carbon paper into a clear locked box, keeping the original card. Players were supposed to put only the carbon copy into the locked box. Bingo balls with numbers would pop from a machine and the numbers would be called. If a player's numbers were in the first 20 called, the player won the jackpot. The winner would produce the original card and employees opened the locked box to look for the carbon match to it. The jackpot started at $10,000 and went up $500 each day there was no winner.

Russell instructed his accomplices to keep a blank card and fill in the numbers as they were called. They announced they had won and hand the card - with carbon still attached - to Russell, who was working near the locked box. Russell would discreetly separate the carbon copy and slip it into the locked box while he and other employees searched for the matching carbon copy.

Once an accomplice took the winnings, he or she would split them with Russell. Russell confessed to the FBI in early 2007. Others confessed earlier this year. A grand jury indicted him and eight others in July.

The other defendants are Johnnie L. Tisley, Jennifer Y. Rawls, Edward D. Conley, Cassandra O. Tenner, Jesse B. Torres and Torlan D. Baldwin.

Lee Jones and Online Poker Cheat Catcher Serge Ravitch Resign From Cake Poker!

Lee Jones

Source: Poker News Daily

In breaking news from the world of online poker, Lee Jones has stepped down as Card Room Manager of Cake Poker, effective immediately. Jones posted in a thread on TwoPlusTwo around 3:00pm ET on Tuesday, “This is a brief announcement to let you know that, as of yesterday, I have resigned my position at Cake Poker and will not be making any further posts here. Their management has made some strategic decisions with which I’m not comfortable.”

Despite departing the site, Jones, who is also a Guest Columnist at Poker News Daily, spoke highly of his former colleagues: “Please direct any questions or concerns to the Cake support staff; they are top-notch people.” Cake Poker is the flagship site of the USA-friendly Cake Poker Network.

Also departing Cake Poker concurrently with Jones is Serge Ravitch, who is known in the online poker world as “adanthar.” Ravitch served as Cake Poker’s Tournament Director and Jones affectionately dubbed him the “Minister of Tournament Arts” in homage to the Harry Potter franchise. Ravitch was one of the figureheads in uncovering the cheating scandal at Absolute Poker.

Ravitch posted in the same TwoPlusTwo thread on Tuesday, “It sincerely pains me to say that, for the same reasons, I am also no longer affiliated with Cake in any way. I wish them the best of luck going forward.” What “strategic decisions” Jones and Ravitch alluded to were not clear at the time of writing. In addition, Cake Poker has not released any statement.

Jones could only tell Poker News Daily on Tuesday afternoon, “I’m just not comfortable with some of the decisions that the Cake management was making.” However, the veteran of the poker world hopes to remain in the industry, explaining to us, “I have a couple of irons in the fire. I certainly have every intention of staying in the poker business, so I’ll have to see what pans out.” Jones formerly brought customer service to new heights while with PokerStars and also worked with the European Poker Tour and CardRunners.

In TwoPlusTwo’s “Cake Poker Feedback Thread,” which is where Jones dropped the bombshell, posters weighed in en masse. The first responder explained, “This isn’t totally unexpected. Best wishes in your future enterprises.” Another poster predicted that Jones and Ravitch would land on their feet: “Lee and ‘adanthar’ are top-notch in my opinion and won’t need luck, but agreed nonetheless.”

According to PokerScout.com, which keeps tabs on online poker room traffic, the Cake Poker Network is the 24th largest worldwide and boasts a seven-day running average of 740 real money ring game players. Its peak traffic passes 1,100 cash game players and the family of sites happily accepts action from the United States.

Besides Cake Poker, other rooms on the Network include the Doyle Brunson-fronted DoylesRoom, Only Poker, Poker4Green, Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies’ Power Poker, Red Star Poker, Phil Laak’s Unabomber Poker, and Victory Poker, the latter of which joined in August.

The holidays have not been kind to the Cake Poker Network, which has not eclipsed the 1,300-cash game player mark since December 21st. In the 30 days prior, it passed 1,300 ring game players 14 times.

Pennsylvania Casino Poker Dealer Caught Cheating His Tables at Rivers Casino!

Source: onlinepoker.org

Michael Eisenberg, a poker dealer who formerly worked at Pennsylvania’s Rivers Casino, was recently arrested for stealing poker chips from won pots. Eisenberg, who is just 25 years of age, was promptly fired from his job and is now facing theft charges.

Though there’s no telling how long Eisenberg has been performing his misdeeds, the tipping point came when security cameras at the Rivers Casino clearly showed Eisenberg removing $501 from poker pots at his own table over the course of an evening.

Security at the Rivers Casino became suspicious when Eisenberg’s tips quickly grew from under $200 per day to in excess of $500 per day. Eisenberg’s embezzlement strategy was actually quite simple. Each time a pot was awarded at his table, he would quietly grab a $5 or $1 chip from the pot as he raked in the folded cards. Eisenberg would the drop the chip into his tip jar, located under the table.

Casino security cited Eisenberg’s greed as the reason for his eventual arrest, noting that his sleight of hand work wasn’t nearly as obvious as his sudden increase in average tips per day.

Most casinos prevent this type of behavior by pooling dealer tips together and then awarding them equally to dealers at the end of a shift. In this way, there’s little incentive to steal money from patrons when the money will ultimately be shared with fifteen, twenty or more people at the end of the day anyways. There’s little doubt that the Rivers Casino will be changing its tip distribution policy following this incident. For now, the casino is remaining relatively quiet regarding the incident, likely in hopes of avoiding an excess of negative press.

What do you think? Are cheating poker dealers pervasive enough in the live casino industry to warrant further scrutiny and anti-cheating measures from casino management? As patrons, we can’t do much more than carefully count our chips each time we win a pot.

Best Poker Cheat Story of 2010

Poker Heist Suspects

Well, I'd call it poker cheating in its most devastating form. That's when poker cheats become poker thieves or robbers and just heist the poker jackpot instead of winning it.

That's exactly what happened on March 7, 2010 at a European Poker Tour tournament at the posh Hyatt Hotel in downtown Berlin, Germany. Four men wearing disguises and brandishing guns and machetes stormed into the poker room set up by the Hyatt and helped themselves to nearly $350,000 of what was to be a $1.36 Million first-prize jackpot. I don't know why they didn't get all the money in the jackpot. Maybe it wasn't on the table when they struck.

The German cops, armed with good surveillance video of the poker heist, searched the city for two weeks before one of the poker robbers panicked and gave himself up. The 21-year-old German national told the cops that he and his three cohorts split the money immediately after the heist. He also ratted out their names. This sounds like the German version of the famous/infamous USA Brinks Heist gone-wrong-after-the-succesful-robbery in the 1950s.

The three suspects on the run were identified as 20-year-old Ahmad el-Awayti, 19-year-old Jihad Chetwie, and 20-year-old and Mustafa Ucarkus. Apparently all four of these suspects were German nationals of Turkish and Arabic descent. But judging by the names, could this have been a crime to finance some act of international terrorisim? Given that it occurred in Germany, where the 9/11 attack plans originated, this possibility cannot be overlooked. In any case, the suspects were all caught and the money recovered, so whatever the poker cheat thieves were going to do with their loot is now moot, pardon the pun...or rhyme.

The first suspect told police that he had cased the Hyatt for several days before the robbery and noticed that the hotel guards did not carry weapons, and that it looked like an easy heist to pull off.

American poker pro Kevin MacPhee won the tournament and received all the first-place jackpot money thanks to the Hyatt's insurance coverage. He also told the media that there was a lot of shouting and hysteria during the robbery.

My take: I would just love to see this type of heist go down at the final table of the main event at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Wow! Wouldn't that be a nice score!!!

First Casino Dealer Convicted in Tran Organization Baccarat Cheating Scam Case

Nearly thirty people were arrested in what is considered the largest international casino cheating scam in history that went on between 2002 and 2007 and raked in more than $30 Million from dozens of mostly US and Canadian casinos, but everyone involved (including all those with the last name Tran and all the other big-casino-cheat honchos and inside casino employees involved) except for forty-six year-old Mike Waseleski pleaded out and received probation or relatively short prison terms. Waseleski, who compromised his casino, the Ameristar Resorts Casino in East Chicago, Indiana, refused to cop out to being in on the huge baccarat cheating fix and was subsequently convicted yesterday of one count of conspiring to commit various offenses against the US government, whatever that means??? I don't know why taking part in cheatng a casino is conspiring against the US government, but that's what the court records say.

Waseleski, who helped the Tran Organization scam $1.5 Million from Ameristar, faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The mastermind of the scam, Phuong Quoc Truong, was sentenced to 6 years in prison earlier this year, so it is hard to imagine that Waseleski, despite his refusal to accept a plea bargain, will get more than a couple of years.

To read more about this huge international baccarat scam, search "Tran Organization Baccarat Scam here.

NBC's "Poker After Dark" is Cheating You With Bullshit Just As Much As GSN's "High Stakes Poker!

The Poker Cheats Cheating You!

NBC's answer to high-stakes poker television, mainly to the Game Show Network's flagship poker show "High Stakes Poker," was "Poker After Dark," which premiered back in 2007. Just Like "High Stakes Poker," "Poker After Dark" is full of shit and cheating you out of your televsion time. The basic premise for "Poker After Dark" is that on each weekly episode the players buy in for $20,000 each and then contend for a winner-takes-all $120,000 first prize. This is all a crock, even though there is a lot less money supposedly changing hands between the players than on "High Stakes Poker."

Evidence: Doyle Brunson has played Ace-Queen against three players on the show. But Brunson, who really is the king of poker cheats, says he refuses to play that same AQ starting hand in real money games not televised. And apparently he does not generally play that hand.

There are also just way too many hands where more money is thrown into the pot pre-flop on bad hands, with several top pros involved at the same time. This kind of action is just not kosher and is practically never seen at the WSOP, nor in its side cash games.

Moreover, there is an all-in move every two episodes and they get called a much higher percentage of the time than in real brick and mortar cash games, solid evidence that this is all full of shit. It seems that there is the pressure for all-in-and-call because of the time constraint of the show. After all, since an episode is approximately forty-five minutes of poker time, there are only around forty-five hands dealt in two episodes comprising ninety minutes. In REAL poker games when money is REALLY exchanged between pro players, these players show lots more discipline and don't just call any all-in bet. Many players can sit hours at a time without calling a single all-in bet.

Doyle Brunson has said that he refuses to play AQ because it "bumps into too many problems." Meanwhile, he plays 10-2 because they were the winning cards on a WSOP final table he won.

PLEASE...gimme a break!

Was $1.5 Million Armed Bellagio Casino Heist Really Worth It?

Actaul surveillance pic of robber

If you haven't heard, a guy wearing a motorcycle helmet and brandishing a hand gun walked into the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas yesterday and robbed a craps table at gunpoint before walking back out the door and hopping on his motorcycle and burning rubber out of Dodge. The only problem is that the $1.5 million or so he stole was not in cash...nor was it in checks or any other negotiable instruments. It was in casino chips. That's right, casino chips. And if you're thinking, "Well, how the hell is the guy gonna cash 'em all out?", you're right, he's got a problem...a BIG problem. And that a fair proportion of these chips were the highest denomination chips on the casino floor and very rarely in players' possession (those being $25,000 chips) makes the problem even BIGGER!

So, how the HELL is this guy gonna cash out those chips?

He's not...that's the answer, especially for any chips above the $1,000 denomination, which, given the fact that all the chips he robbed fit into the sack he carried along with gun, had to be most of them. Whatever $100 and $500 chips he bagged, he will be able to cash out fairly easy in the Bellagio because the casino sees tons of big action and lots of circulation of those denomination chips. For the $1,000 chips he'd best use cohorts to break them down into $500 and $100 chips at craps and other tables (why not the same table he robbed? LOL) and then cash them out at the casino cages.

But $5,000, $10,000 and $25,000 chips? Forget, buddy, they are going to be nothing more than collectors' items, and not the kind that priceless stolen artworks are. No mysterious and secretive collector is gonna pay squat for those big Bellagio humdinger chips. And what's more: after a period of time, probably a few years at the most, the Bellagio, like all casinos cyclically do, will discontinue its current series of casino chips and replace them with a new one with a new design. At that time, exactly 120 days after the chip-changeover, ALL Belagio's chips will be unredeemable.

And forget about cashing them out at other casinos in Vegas. All casinos will be on the lookout for people trying to cash out or exchange Bellagio chips.

So back to the question "Was it worth it?"

Absolutely not! The most this guy and whatever partners he may have had are gonna get out of this heist is probably ten or twenty grand--not much for risking a ten-year prison sentence--at least.

Regular non-violent casino cheating is much more lucrative--believe me!

Anyone Out There Have Any Info on Sam Simon's Huge Online Poker Cheat Scams?

Sam Simon

I came across an article on onlinepokernews.org claiming that Sam Simon, an avid poker player and successful television producer who happens to be one of the original developers of "The Simpsons," has told the site that a certain well-known high-stakes poker player got cheated out of more than $4 million playing online by one or more big-time poker cheats who managed to sneak into the unidentified player's house and install a high-tech digital camera in the ceiling of his study above the computer screen on his desk. Thus they secretly filmed all his hole cards as they appeared on the alleged victim's computer screen and used that huge advantage to fleece him. Simon allegedly said this particular mystery online poker-cheat victim is also a huge brick and mortar poker player in cash games. No details were offered on how the victim found the camera besides his repeatedly losing and losing and maybe becoming suspicious that a camera was actually there.
However, I have heard of no incidents or reports backing up any of these claims, and was wondering if maybe you have. Simon has allegedly also been speaking publicly about other huge online poker scams he's heard of firsthand from cheat victims, mostly collusion scams, which is nothing new to any of us.

My take: Well, if Simon's claims are true and not just a figment of the same fertile imagination that created "The Simpsons," I sure hope that the victim is one of the poker-cheat assholes that cheat us with their acting-jobs  on the Game Show Network's "High Stakes Poker."

Why Was (or is) Poker Called "The Cheating Game"?

Believe it or not, I actually got three emails during the past 10 days asking me this question. If ever there was a self-explanatory response in a question, right?

Well, for those of you who still don't get it, the reason Poker was originally called "The Cheating Game" is because nearly everyone who partook in it cheated. The massive all-around cheating at poker started in the Mississippi riverboat days (1840-1880), but it really took hold in the legendary American era we call "The Old West" (1870-1895). There, anyone who was worth his weigh in anything turned to cheating at poker.

The two preferred forms of cheating were marking cards and hold-out gadgets that allowed poker cheats to switch cards out of the game and stick them in a device rolled up their arm inside their sleave, and then sneak them back in play when they were needed to make a hand. Poker cheating collusion hardly existed back then as each cheat was in it for his own.

My favorite form of Old West American poker cheating was a method poker cheats used to mark cards. Called the "sun-dry marking card" method, it was done exactly as it was called. Poker Cheats would take the aces out of the deck and lay them backs-up flat on a table underneath the hot sun. After several hours of exposure, the backs of the cards would dry out and turn a slightly lighter shade of red or blue. The key was to take them out of the sun at the right time, before the color change would be noticeable to someone sitting in the poker game not in on the cheat.

As for poker being called the cheating game today, I think it still should be. After all, there is widespread cheating going on in poker today and there are certainly much more forms of it, and these are improved forms.

As for online poker, is it called "The Online Cheating Game"?

Well, it certainly should be!