Nat Arem offers analysis of Absolute Poker situation following his trip to Costa Rica
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In his blog (at natarem.com) PokerDb founder Nat Arem, who was instrumental in uncovering the truth behind the recent Absolute poker cheating scandal, has been offering an interesting first-hand account of the trip he took at the end of October to the Absolute offices down in Costa Rica. In his report, Arem provides his take on the story of the scandal so far, peppered with insights and information gleaned from his October visit.
The trip report is an ongoing series of posts. Today, Arem published a post that fleshed out his list of ‘Things that I am reasonably confident are true, but cannot prove or say for sure’ as outlined in the initial blog entry on the trip. The entry included an especially interesting paragraph that dispels one of the common assumptions regarding the method by which cheaters exploited players at Absolute:
For all of the discussion of user #363 being some sort of superuser who was watching the table and relaying cards to POTRIPPER, I doubt that was the case. User #363 was another one of the four cheating accounts named, although I cannot publicly identify which one. On a side note, assuming that the #363 name was not changed in recent weeks, the name on the account was not a name that I recognized (note that AP did not show me the name, I found out via another method while in CR). Anyway, if #363 was another cheating account, it does not really make sense within the context of the theory that there was one superuser account that never played while the cheaters used a bunch of other names to stay anonymous. After all, the #363 account did play and did cheat and did win. Therefore, it’s pretty clear there was another method of seeing the holecards.
Arem also writes that he believes the core vulnerability of the Absolute system - the ability to access hole card information before a hand goes to showdown - has been corrected:
I don’t have any real proof of this. But, obviously, people at AP told me that it was closed and they couldn’t really “prove” it was closed because showing me around the backend doesn’t conclusively prove that it doesn’t exist somewhere else in the system. More than anything, it was a read of mine that they were telling me the truth. I didn’t believe a number of things that I was told or shown, but I did believe this one. And, logically, it seems like they could have just switched their code back over to the old system of writing hands pretty easily assuming my early theories are correct.
