Absolute Poker Hacking - More Details Surface
- Absolute Poker Hacked - More Details
The Online Poker World continues to be abuzz with the Absolute Poker situation. On Friday the story hit the newswires. The story about an Absolute Poker employee that hacked the Absolute Poker system to allow himself to play Hold ‘Em at an online table and see all the other players hole cards. Your ‘Dead Money’ blogger has seen the episode referred to as ‘Pokergate’. This is very interesting because large percentages of the online players are well under the 40 years of age needed to recall ‘Watergate’. Here are some more of the details that have come to light over the weekend.
In September 21 year old Marco Johnson asked Absolute Poker for a hand history of a high stakes tournament he had played previously. Marco felt there were too many weird things happening during the tournament and he felt he had been cheated. Marco finished 2nd in the tournament and was awarded the prize money of $20,000. Turns out that Absolute Poker sent Marco was the complete hand histories of everyone involved in the tournament. The hand histories included hole cards for everyone and every hand, IP addresses and email addresses of all participants within an excel spreadsheet. The winner of the tournament was the online player ‘Potripper’ who won the tournament and the $30,000 1st prize. Johnson turned the spreadsheet over to New York attorney Serge Ravitch a professional poker player who also moderates 2 + 2 Poker Forum.
“In the last hand, he just blew it. He made a gigantic call with 10 high. The chances of winning a hand like that are something like one in 1,000. It was obvious he was cheating,”
Johnson also provided the excel spreadsheet to a poker blogger Nat Arem who looked at the IP addresses. Arem also discovered that at every table Potripper was at also included 
another user that other players could not see at the online table. Aren traced the IP address of the observer back to location of the Absolute Poker servers. One last little item and I am not sure of any significance is that Mark Seif was in the hand history provided.
Ravitch the attorney estimated that online players lost between $500,000 and $1,000,000 over a two week period though he informs ABC he can’t be sure when the cheating started.
Absolute Poker has reportedely promised an official statement regarding the hacking and what remedies will be undertaken to reimburse players that were involved. Also Absolute Poker has said that the security glitch in the servers has been closed, though the online community is waiting for the official statement to hear and see the proof. Former Director of Operations at AP AJ Ripper was named in the ABC story as the owner of account Potripper. Additionally an IP address was linked to part owner Scott Tom who AP says has not been involved with the company for over a year. Investigations are continuing to ascertain if these people were involved or if somebody else was using their accounts.
Go to this Just Poker Talk Post to see the recreation of the hand histories and see how easy it was for Potripper to win the high stakes tournament.
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Your ‘Dead Money’ blogger Michael 
has played at Absolute Poker, but certainly not at the high stakes tables so I probably never contributed any funds to Potripper.
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