CBS Video on UB AP Cheating
Written by Roger S | Sunday, November 30th, 2008
The poker scandal that hit poker players at the online poker sites Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker was presented on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday the 30th of November.
In this 60 minutes show the poker scandal, which took many by 
surprise, will be looked at from many different angles explaining how it could happen and how it was exposed by regular players.
It is CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft and producer Ira Rosen that have worked together with the Pulitzer winning reporter from the Washington Post Gilbert Gaul to map out the scandal that hit the poker world with great force not long ago. The investigation took the reporters several months to complete and the result is a documentary that reveals how the online players at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker could expose the fraud.
Todd Witteles, a computer scientist, can be seen on the trailer for this CBS show talking about the oddity of a player raising with an obviously bad hand. This kind of play seemed outright crazy and still the man continued to show up with it every day and always end up as a winner despite the illogic of it all.
Michael Josem, a computer expert who just like Todd Witteles plays poker gives the statistics for such continuous success with bad hands and according to his calculations this would be equivalent of winning a one in a million jackpot six times in a row. While this seems outrageous it was not professional mathematicians who discovered this cheating but the regular players in the poker rooms.
As the players started to suspect that the poker play in the poker rooms wasn’t fair they turned to the management but weren’t exactly met with any useful response to their claims. It could have all ended there unless so many players had been affected and the issue was taken to further investigation.
The show on the CBS 60 Minutes also looks into the background of the two poker rooms and maps out how they are managed. According to a press release on the CBS 60 Minute web site both of the poker rooms are run from a shopping mall in Costa Rica and their servers are hosted in an Indian reservation in Canada outside of Montreal. One of many interesting notes on the show is that the Mohawk tribe that issues the licenses was found to have no background in casino gambling but rather in tobacco.
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· Written by Roger S · Filed Under Poker News · Comments Off
