Update: Evidence of cheating at Absolute Poker reaches tipping point
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While a definitive conclusion on allegations of cheating at Absolute Poker will be nearly impossible without some sort of admission from the company itself, the general consensus of the online poker community, based on an increasingly substantial body of mounting evidence, is that Absolute Poker was clearly compromised by a user or group of users.
For background on this story, read our related archived reports.
An excellent time line of the scandal pieced together by Todd Witteles over at NeverWinPoker lays out the majority of the most damning evidence and pieces together the story with a healthy dose of reasonable speculation to explain how all of the pieces might fit together. The critical point in his time line:
July or early August, 2007: AP is in the process of a major software upgrade. One of the programmers, who lives locally in Costa Rica, stumbles upon account #363. He realizes how much money one could make by exploiting this little test account at the highest games the site has to offer. He realizes that this would need to be done carefully, as much suspicion will be placed upon a new account that inexplicably crushes the best players in the world. This rogue programmer comes up with the following plan of action…
An explosive thread over at 2+2 makes a strong case for the involvement, albeit possibly indirect, of current employees at Absolute and raises the interesting possibility that the hand history file which has provided so much of the fuel for this story was provided by a whistle blower inside AP.
AP has yet to comment on these new developments, and all evidence is still, at this point, anecdotal and circumstantial.
