60 Minutes to Air Report on Online Poker Cheats

It has been confirmed that the CBS News program “60 Minutes” will be airing this Sunday, November 30 at 7 pm EST a news segment covering the cheating scandals on Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker.  This segment is the finale of a four month investigation by 60 Minutes along with The Washington Post newspaper entitled “How Online Gamblers Unmasked Cheaters”.
 
A commercial posted by 60 Minutes shows a clip of an interview conducted with Todd Witteles, an online poker player who is better known as “Dan Druff”.  Witteles had this to say about the Absolute Poker scandal, “This Graycat person was new and at first he seemed like a live one. He seemed terrible. He was raising just really, really bad hands against very good hands. He seemed to play crazy. He seemed like he was giving his money away, except the only thing was, he wasn’t losing.” Witteles then went on to explain why Graycat’s play on Absolute Poker was out of the ordinary: “He was playing in a style that was sure to lose, but he was killing the game day after day.”
 
The commercial then goes on to explain that Graycat’s play was winning at 15 standard deviations above the mean, “which was approximately equivalent to winning a one in a million jackpot six consecutive times.”  The final nail in the coffin was when a player by the name of POTRIPPER made a 10 high call against another player, Marco “CrazyMarco” Johnson in a $1,000 tournament back in September 2007.  An observer to the action between the players was Absolute Poker user number 363 which later traced back to the company’s headquarters in Costa Rica.
 
Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet both are owned by the same parent company, The Kahnawake Gaming Commission who had this to say in a statement release regarding the cheating scandal, “The Commission found clear and convincing evidence to support the conclusion that between the approximate dates of May 2004 to January 2008, Russell Hamilton, an individual associated with Ultimate Bet’s affiliate program, was the main person responsible for and benefiting from the multiple cheating incidents.”
 
The player bases of both Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were merged to form the CEREUS poker network on Tuesday.  There was a delay in CEREUS’ launch which was likely due to an ongoing battle in Canada between Tokwiro (the current owners of Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker) and Excapsa (the former owners of Ultimate Bet).  Tokwiro has been awarded $15 million in the case, which has been used to reimburse players who were cheated in the scandal.
 
Tokwiro COO, Paul Leggett said in a press release on November 5th, “Now that the main perpetrator has been named, the settlement with the previous owners is behind us, and players have received refunds, it should now be apparent that Tokwiro had no involvement in this cheating and that we have fought to correct it with every tool at our disposal.”