looks cool but page me when this **** gets done. none of these actually get finished it seems like

I don`t know, if someone who is not really into onlinepoker watches this? Doesnt he think that all sites might be rigged?

Glad you included Hellmuth, he is just as bad as Duke in this.

Interesting question.

I think this is a brand specific issue. For example if Tylenol has a product harm crisis - ie. some capsules are found to be laced with cyanide does this impact sales of Advil? PokerStars is a very strong brand and so I don't think this film will impact them.

This may hurt some of the smaller sites and startups that haven't established a track record yet.

Putting a greater spotlight on UltimateBet and those behind it is a good thing overall. This is especially true because the Poker industry has such a shady past and there are so many ways to scam players. Those in the industry need to learn that players won't put up with these scams any longer and if they engage in this behavior they will be exposed.

For these reasons its important that all the winning players and anyone who can afford it pitch in and support this project (see 1st post on how to do so).

You know you have my support EG, and thanks again for your time on Skype.

Hiding information because it might make people more informed decisions about their personal finances is not a good idea.

In this case, I think stories like this are pretty important for pointing out the need for solid regulation.

My problem with this documentary is it almost seems moot now. Sure there was a cheating scandal. But now the new scandal is the site shut down. Many more players lost big sums of cash on black friday to ap/ub than to the cheating scandal.

I don't disagree that current players have so far been jammed up. That isn't over yet, so we don't know what the final outcome will be. But I do think that if we show these folks they will be outed for this behavior, situations like the current one will become more rare. Annie Duke is an easy example. She went from the UB situation into another troubled situation with little issue. While many called her out, more needed to be done and said to make a return to the community very difficult. I don't know if our project will help change this, but I feel we have to try.

As far as UltimateBet itself is concerned, yes it is a moot point because the company is essentially dead.

As far as poker in general is concerned, it is a far from moot case. If it goes unpunished then it will be repeated.

Watch the 60 minutes report and listen to the closing comments from Frank Catania.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5119802n

The fact the site is now dead is irrelevant. The people behind it and behind the resulting coverup need to be punished, that is what is important.

i agree, seems like there are always new trailers etc for doc's like this and then they just disappear.

Moot. Are you kidding? The more about this the better. Eventhough a more recent event may overshadow an earlier event does not change the fact that the earlier event is important. Think World Wars or many other analogies.

In. Happy to be part of Team Grover, even though I wish I had the money to be a Mookman Immortal.

Ok, am I missing something? Why is this going to be the first comment about this?

Kickstarter needs more rewards.

looks great apart from that

I'm looking forward to the full documentary.

It is a challenging standard, both financially and emotionally.

More levels or more freebies associated with the current levels? I mean, the reason we are doing a KS project is because we are broke filmmakers ;-)

Also, back to the moot point. Another reason for telling this story is that it is hella interesting. With the FTP case, it looks like a bunch of players had this giant pool of money in front of them and they just helped themselves.

At UB, they had a grand strategy with the IPO and the company spinoffs to leverage the asset base into something much larger. To get at the player money, they took over $100k on average each and every week for years by sitting in games and stacking players. In hindsight, it looks silly when they could have done the same with accounting entries. There are a lot of interesting layers that we will unpack for the film

will the finished documentary reveal just how culpable hellmuth is? career shattering information?

Not sure the exact depth that Phil Hellmuth was involved in, but why hasn't he taken more crap for his role in UB in general? Seems like Joe Sebok took way more crap from the community for his small role/spokesman job than PH ever did.

The short answer is Paul Leggett. They made a deal with Paul to clean up the brand in the middle of a scandal and he did an amazing job of convincing some influential people that he was on the level. They listened to Leggett and came away saying they felt the company wanted to do the right thing.

Looking backwards, it is pretty ugly to realize that the AP folks were already hollowing out the remains while the UB folks were just making sure they didn't have to go too far into pocket to pay out the refunds. The counter-argument is that a public audit would have exposed past owners to criminal prosecution and significant financial loss.

Here is Phil describing Paul at a charity tournament.

I'm really interested to see this. While I wasn't affected by UB at any point a lot of my friends were

Hellmuth is pretty good at brushing it off, and never pretended that he was doing it for anyone but himself.

Sebok justified what he did by saying he was going in to bat for players, and after it became clear that he had done the square root of **** all for anyone, tried to argue his way out of it on here and elsewhere, predictably enough digging himself in deeper with every post.

That doesn't mean it's right that Sebok got more heat, but I think it explains why that's the case to an extent.

Awesome.

Looks more polished/professional than I initially assumed. Great Job

more levels obviously, kind of a big jump from 100 to 1000

needs at least a 250 and a 500 imo

I think it would help to get more money for someone may be able to afford a little more than 100 but not up to 1000

I know its hard to come up with freebies in your situation, maybe if we all think about it smarterly we can come up with something good.

there are some bright bulbes in this dark place that is NVG...

you need something that can be manufactured kind of cheaply but is also nice to get... damn nothing comes to mind...

you should definetly get more levels, Ill post again if something comes my mind.

best of luck with the project.

donated, and thank you so much for the time you have spent on this.

Gotcha, it is kind of unclear but you can actually donate whatever you want. So, you could give 350 if you were feeling really nvg (having just written that, I will probably make a treefiddy level though).

Also, thanks Andy for getting us over our first dime!