Absolute Poker to Be Audited As Evidence Of Insider Cheating Mounts

After a month of allegations of cheating involving a super user account that could see player's hole cards, endless forum threads that seem to prove the existence of such and now damning claims that the super user account belonged to its former CEO and new Davidson Matthew Club member Scott Tom, Absolute Poker will now finally be audited by someone other than Absolute Poker.

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission, which granted the gaming license to Absolute's owner Tokwiro Enterprises, has directed Gaming Associates to "conduct a thorough audit of all circumstances, provide findings and recommendations to the commission."

"The audit will not be restricted to examining theories circulating in Internet chat rooms and forums," said KGC commissioner David Montour.

The pending audit follows Absolute Poker's own investigation, which resulted in a statement posted on Mark Seif's blog on BluffMagazine.com that a super user account never existed but pots of gold at the end of rainbows do exist as do leprechauns, unicorns and strippers who dance just to get through college.

As of tonight, Seif, who reportedly has a stake in Absolute Poker, finally issued his own statement on the matter, saying among other things:

"I want to find out the truth. I want to know what, if anything, may have happened . . . I am open to the possibility that improper, unethical and perhaps even unqualified cheating may have occurred at AP. I am even open to the possibility that present or former AP employees, or executives may have participated, condoned or were negligent in failing to discover the alleged improper acts."

For those who have been living under a rock or having a month long bender-ific time in far away places like us, the biggest scandal to hit online poker began when high stakes cash players on Absolute Poker became suspicious of several players who seemingly came out of nowhere to win hundreds of thousands of dollars off them while making plays that only seemed logical if they knew what their opponents' hole cards were.

Around the same time another player by the name of Potripper won a $1,000 buy-in tournament with play many considered suspicious, including not folding a single hand for 20 minutes and calling an all-in with just a 10-high and no draw on the final hand.

Afterwards, the event's runner-up, Marco "CrazyMarco" Johnson, requested a hand history from Absolute and what he got was a 10MB Excel file that included detailed info about every hand played at every table during the tournament, IP and email addresses of people playing and observing the game, and most interestingly, every hole card held by players in the tournament, even those that didn't showdown.

The document eventually made it onto the forums where Nat Arem (aka N 80 50 24), snagglepuss and some others went over the data and saw that someone with a low UserID, User 363, opened the table where Potripper was seated about two minutes into the tournament and observed it throughout.

As Arem states on his blog, "This number is incredibly low and I instantly knew that the account had been created by AP or someone who was associated in some way with AP. It had to be a test account of some kind to be made that early in the system."

Indeed, User 363 had a Costa Rican IP and had the exact same IP with another user "[email protected]" which was traced to Scott Tom, the former CEO and part owner of Absolute. The assumption is that Scott Tom was observing the hole cards at the table and passing the info on to Potripper to enable him to make the right plays. Who is Potripper? Well he's been subsequently identified as AJ Green, former Director of Operations at AP and Scott Tom's best friend. AJ Green is currently VP of operations at nine.com.

For more on the AP super user scandal, check out 2+2's Updated Cliff Notes On Absolute Poker Scandal here.

For Nat Arem's blog, go here.

For Dan Druff's and the NWP thread, go here.