Whole story can be read by clicking on this link.
A few weeks back I blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn?t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated.
A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by Absolute Poker have blown the scandal wide open.
You can read the first-hand account in the following thread at 2+2 Poker Forum, but here?s the short version:
Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents? hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who?d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker ?accidentally? did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player?s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put ?accidentally? in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whomever ?accidentally? sent the file gets their proper hero?s welcome in the end.