When I made this site the point was to be different from sites that aren’t fun. Well cheating scandals aren’t fun and in the good majority of cases they also aren’t true. Whether the one with Absolute is true or not I think has mostly been decided. Perception is reality in this world and they have a real problem. But that has been covered. So I thought I would give an opinion on a few side matters.
I am hearing a lot of people say “if they regulated online poker this wouldn’t happen”. This is foolish at worst and at best a pipedream. This won’t be the thing that causes regulation; this is just fuel for our enemies. Let’s remember that online gambling has few friends. The friends we do have right now have to defend themselves against the “click your mouse and lose your house people”. It is sort of like having a wish and then living a life like that wish came true. Or maybe a better example would be buying a lottery ticket and immediately going out and buying a Ferrari.
People won’t leave poker because of this. They might leave Absolute Poker because of this (though that doesn’t appear to be true, I signed on 2 nights ago and they had 5 5-10 NL games going) but they aren’t done with online poker. All things like this do is make losers lose less and leave. Is that bad? It certainly is but it isn’t the end of the world. It does mean that the games will get harder (as if they hadn’t already) and more pros will need to get real jobs. When you hear that someone is leaving online poker because of this I would put it at about .0001% is about this scandal. It just makes the decision easier if someone is losing or not winning as much as they used to win.
This isn’t even the only time this particular thing happened. Planet Poker and Paradise Poker both were hit by scandals, Planet Poker never recovered and
There is good news and I would argue great news. These cheaters were caught and many cheaters online are being caught. As disheartening as this may seem it is actually a good thing, when was the last time you heard of someone being caught in a casino cheating at poker. Certainly it has happened but it is rare. Does that mean that no one is cheating playing live poker? Hardly. Online poker is nothing more than a lot of data, the more data the better and accurate information. So while it may appear that all of these scandals are bad in reality it is just proving one thing. Online cheaters can be caught and dealt with. So if there is a bright side to all of this that might be it.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
It absolutely staggers me that anyone would play at AP after this…but I shouldn’t be surprised. I agree with Beanie that this will deter almost no one from playing online (and it shouldn’t).
I’m blown away that AP’s engineers would be so stupid as to desigining a “super-user” client. There’s no reason for it. At all. Other than cheating, that is, and in a proper development environment with code and check-out reviews, there’s no way for someone to do this independently. It’d have to be a group decision amongst many people. And that’s not good.
I feel good that this scandal was exposed this quickly and strongly.