Two really big scandals from the online poker world have come to light in the last few days. First off, TheVoid, winner of the recent 2007 WCOOP Main Event on Pokerstars, the largest online poker tournament ever held in terms of prize pool, was disqualified, and Pokerstars is moving everyone up one spot on the list and redistributing the prize pool accordingly. Turns out the guy was multi-accounting. He had several different accounts, presumably on different computers, playing the same tourney, and rode of those horses all the way to first place. Pokerstars showed a lot of integrity in the way they handled the entire affair.

Contrast that with the other scandal, which is almost too ridiculous to believe. A well known and successful online player (X) had played a high stakes sit and go, which is a one table tournament, on Absolute Poker. He thought one of the players (Y) was making a lot of very suspicious plays, almost as if he knew the other players hole cards.

So X examined Y's history on one of the sites that tracks those sort of things, and noticed a lot of statistical improbabilities in Y's play and win-rate. X posted about this on an online poker forum, and Absolute claimed they investigated and found no problems. X requested a hand history of the tournament from Absolute Poker, and they sent him an Excel spreadsheet, which he found to be mostly gibberish. He handed it off to his friend Z. Z is well known in the online poker community for founding one of the original player tracking sites, as well as some other interesting poker related projects, but he is not much of a poker player himself. I think I read he's a law student at Emory.

Anyway, Z had the technical knowhow to know what the spreadsheet contained. Not just the hand history, but hole cards, IP addresses, and even the IPs of observers. He found first that Y folded the first two hands until another account, #363, logged on to watch the table. Then Y started playing like he knew the other holecards. Then through a series of IP pings, crosschecking email addresses, and other nifty computer detective stuff that is beyond my knowledge, Z tracked down Y to an IP shared by an email address owned by one of the CEO's of Absolute Poker.

The conclusion? The CEO was using a "pitboss" type of account so he could see the holecards, while actually playing with a different account. That's just messed up.

Needless to say, very few people who read online poker forums will ever play at Absolute again, nor their sister-site, Ultimate Bet. I wonder what Phil Helmuth, Ultimate Bet's most well known logobearer, will do?