This link contains the extraordinary accusation that a bunch of players on Absolute poker could see their opponents' hole cards. (Edit: There is an updated thread here ). Accusations such as this, and online poker being 'rigged' are widespread, always untrue, and just used by losing players to justify their results. But this one is true. There is 0% chance that the players in questions don't have the ability to see all the cards at the table.
Basically, there are 3 or 4 accounts who play a beyond awful style of poker, yet never ever call down with a losing hand while at the same time never ever folding to bluffs. This includes making a call of a massive bet with Ten hi no draw on the turn, only to find that, surprise surprise, their opponent has 9 hi! This is imo probably the biggest scandal in online poker history, certainly since Planet Poker's RNG got hacked in 1999.
Some thoughts:
i) If stuff like this gets in the press, it's gonna really scare away fish from playing online poker. Selfishly, Id want it kept hush hush, but I think it's really important to have freedom of information and this chicanery should be exposed.
ii) It's going to be catastrophic for AP to admit this happened, even though the evidence is indisputable. I suspect that the accounts will be closed and AP will try to brush it under the carpet. Right now the only people that know about this are the High Stakes winners, whose business they don't really want that much. Further, they know that if they continue to have great games, people are just gonna make the assumption that the loophole has been closed, and play anyway.
iii) AP should compensate all the players who had their money stolen, whether they still have access to the cheaters' stolen funds or not.
iv) The cheater(s) is a total moron. He basically played 'perfectly' every single hand, NEVER calling down with a loser, NEVER failing to bluff an opponent who was weak, NEVER bluffing an opponent who was strong. Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to do that? This makes me think that we aren't dealing with a sophisticated computer hacker -- someone smart enough to do that (and I bet plenty of real smart folk have tried - and failed), would surely not be so dumb as to play so obviously. I would guess it's an inside job and that someone at AP who has access to the User Account settings is in on the swindle. Of course, AP will never admit this.
v) It's pretty fun to think about how you would play against these guys now. i.e. if you were playing someone who could see your hole cards and played like these thiefs, and you knew this, but they didn't know you knew this, what is optimal strategy? Could you actually be +EV?? Probably not, but it's fun to think about some of the scenarios that could come up. If you were given this omnivision, how would you play and how much money would you make? As these guys only got caught cos they were so goddamn retarded, who are we to guarantee that there aren't other people will similar superpowers, but smarter who have taken the online economy for a bunch of money?
vi) What should AP do? No one is going to trust them to come out with the full truth, seeing as that likely isn't in their best financial interests, and it seems like an inside job. Further, their support/investigations staff are a total and utter joke, people with limited smarts, knowledge of poker etc. They need to open their books up *completely* to an internationally respected auditors. Let them see *all* available evidence, work out who was involved, what the loophole is, how to close it etc. Make their report public. Invest serious time/money in making sure this doesn't happen again. Chances of this happening - 0.1% :(
-courtesy of Dean