As many people know there is a scandal involving UltimateBet and cheating on their site. Most of the scandal predates the current management and as a consultant for UB at the time I decided to contribute some thoughts. And then wow! So let me start from the beginning and maybe that will help. At no point in this discussion will I ever condone cheating or cheaters. As far as I am concerned I really hope they catch whoever it is behind all of this. I have told this story many times in this blog and elsewhere but just for ease I will retell it.
In the 2nd year of the WSOP I played in the Aruba event after winning 3 aruba seats. I played poker locally for many years but this was the first time I had ever had some success in tournaments. This started my online bankroll and I met many of the people I still call friends today. That next year would see me winning I believe it was 10 Aruba seats, I am not sure the number really matters at this point. Once you had one the rest were given to you in cash so that was 90k. I was also a bit ahead of the curve of the cash games but I was certainly no super baller, at that time I played a lot of 15-30 limit (6 tables and such) on Party and had some really good runs. In the 2004 WSOP I went fairly deep (about 150 or so), when I busted out I was invited to a party where I met Annie Duke. Let me back up a bit. After Aruba I was doing well online, enough to see that something very promising could happen for me in poker. It was also clear that the business side of things would need some people to help manage things. As such I pitched a system to PokerStars first (on the Poker Stars cruise), Full tilt second (in Reno of that year) and ultimately to Annie Duke at this party. Annie was very intrigued about my ideas on how to treat the best customers the best and many of my ideas regarding tournament structures and how the games might be a bit better. It was also obvious that UB would have an overlay in their Aruba tournament that year and so I proposed that I would take a number of seats in exchange for my ideas and because I was playing most of the WPT and WSOP at this time I would become an affiliate of UB, essentially investing all of the proceeds from the seats I would sell to well known players into promotions for this program. The idea was a monster hit, this was the early days of rakeback when no one really even knew what it would be called. I certainly did not invent rakeback but I was on the ground floor on what would be a trend of good value to poker players for the future.
From the time I met Annie to approximately May of the following year it was a series of disasters. The big games on UB were filling up and that was a direct result of a lot of my hard work with my affiliate stuff. Politically though within UB there were a ton of issues that were unrelated to my success, also players did not just want to play UB they wanted to play other sites and wanted to know if I could get them similar deals at those places. When it came time for UB and I to come to another agreement their was not an overlay in the upcoming tournament and I think secretly people did not see a point in paying me as both a consultant and an affiliate any longer. At this point I hardly knew anyone at all other than Annie Duke, I only met Russ Hamilton once in Los Angeles. So for about 9 months to a year I helped out with the tournament schedule and some general promotion ideas. Meanwhile I knew virtually no one and I certainly had no inside access to anything really. I did not need any of that, my players were generating a significant portion of the rake for UB and already that was providing me with a decent income. Adding additional rooms would only help that, they were not crazy that I would not be exclusive to them anymore but without paying me as a consultant I was essentially a free agent.
One thing that has come up is “did Beanie have success at other sites”, the two other sites I have had success at are Party Poker and Bodog, with Bodog being by far the bigger of the two. I also won my 2004 WSOP seat on PokerStars. UB and Bodog were my main sites, Bodog for limit poker and UB for tournaments.
Another thing that people are misunderstanding is when I said that I send multiple transactions a day to people I do not even know. Which of course is a reference to rakeback and the fact that most of these customers are not people that I have met. So I hope that helps on that particular part. I do in fact trade with a lot of players online but likely not much more than any other high stakes player. I think for the average guy my transactions would be wild but to a rakeback affiliate or another high stakes player it would be very normal.
Over the course of the next 3-4 years I got to know Russ Hamilton, not so much regarding UB but more poker deals in general. You have to remember that I had little access at this point, I was just a guy from Minnesota. Russ has become a good friend within poker, we have really never had any significant business dealings, I sort of use him as a mentor within the poker business. When I quit consulting with UB that virtually ended my relationship with Annie Duke and we have hardly spoken since then.Â
Over time UB went from my biggest program to 4th or 5th which was just based on customer demand. I now maintain a relationship with the new management but I have very little access. This was brought up because I mentioned that I visited Costa Rica to see UB in May. So did about 20 other affiliates including Nat Arem. I am not trying to throw Nat Arem under the bus because in my eyes Nat is an online poker superhero for what he did with the AP scandal. I just point it out in an effort to say that I was not on some covert mission or part of some monster cover up because I understand that for most people this whole world of online poker is a bit foreign.
Also I quit posting in the thread on 2+2 because there really is no benefit for me (and also people in the thread asked me to stop, so I did). I will post a link to the thread at the bottom.Â
Some other tidbits:
I know nothing of the account -Fred- and have no idea who the owner is, at the WSOP I met Fred David but I never recieved a transfer from that account, my understanding is the same as Freddy Deeb’s that it is just a management account. I have no information on that account at all or Fred David’s role at UB at the time, or if he even had one. Whether that is all just big a coincidence or not is not something I have information on but I will be happy to share whatever comes to light.
dont-trust-paul-nobles.com was a site put up by someone that I had a business dispute over. It was covered a bit on p5’s and within days of that site being put up the matter was resolved and the site got taken down. It is sort of a long uninteresting story, I am pretty sure the guy that put up the site regrets dealing in that manor as he has become very successful in other endeavors. I was supposed to get that URL and a few others as part of the agreement we settled on but I have been lazy about transfering them over.
In closing I will still follow the thread on 2+2 and try to address people’s concerns and if anything comes to light maybe I will pass it on to Nat or post it here. There is really no equity for me in coming to the defense of anyone, even people who have treated me well because people want answers and I can not give them. I had very little access back then and even less now. For me to be viewed in any way shape or form as condoning cheating or trying to divert people’s attention from the scandal was never my intent, so to any extent that happened I would like to sincerely apologize. Here is the link to the thread on 2+2.
