Make sure to bash his site at EVERY opportunity on facebook/twitter/2+2/everywhere.

Basically if we can prevent his site from ever amassing a legit player pool, it can never compete.

We can't keep everyone off the site, but all we have to do is not let it hit that "critical mass" that all online sites need to survive/be profitable and eventually they'll go broke trying to get it to that required critical mass of players.

It isn't about whether these guys plan to cheat players, they would have to be fools to consider that. The issue is twofold. First, Ryan and his CTO Uri Kozai facilitated the mechanisms that allowed the fraud to occur during their entire tenure. The DGE letter states Ryan gained control over the room in 2005. Control that begat a responsibility to shareholders and players. Apparently he punted and chose to do none of the typical due diligence one expects from standard software acquisition deals. Why? And if he and Kozai truly had control (signs suggest this isn't true, something the DGE failed to grok), how did Kozai continue to allow former owners the kind of deep access to nearly all phases of the software necessary to continue the criminal conspiracy?

Going backwards, Ryan was picked for his accounting expertise and his experience in a shelf offering at Cryptologic. They determined he could get them over the IPO finish line faster than anyone. To do so, he had to build a fake set of financials for the company (they are called pro forma but are really imaginary docs as if the new company was there all along). To build a credible/auditable set of financials, Ryan had to have access to both ieLogic and eWorld Holdings cashflows and expenses. As a seasoned accountant, the tell-tale signs of what was going on would have been clear with Hamilton paying player contracts and other marketing expenses directly from his poker accounts. To those crying incompetence, I refer you to the fact Ryan was able to get the AIM to bend it's rules on how many years of finances a company needed to list in order to pull off the 2006 IPO. It didn't take the market long to realize the chicanery with the stock losing half its value within months of listing. Compare that to Party that rose by another 50% in the year after listing.

The second area is the software and its lead architect. We cannot know what the DGE considers to be a new software platform. If Kozai took core UltimateBet game logic and the base Oracle server platform and rewrote the client software in a new language, is that a new software? What about affiliate and banking databases? Remember, Kozai retook possession of the platform in 2010 and immediately put a re-worked Spotlight Poker into action. Then engineers posted about reworking the client with RealTime Edge releasing a social gaming platform. Is it far-fetched to believe that former architecture exists to some degree? Again, nobody believes that Russ and Travis are going to figure out how to turn on God Mode, but for a company to continue to monetize software used to defraud players of millions is rude at best.

Beyond that, Kozai was and is a Key Man. And the facts show that his efforts as data gatekeeper prevented players from full refunds in 2008, to the extent that he is almost singly responsible for our not knowing how much money was stolen. We know for a fact that 3 players lost to superusers in a tourney, the company was made aware and they were never made whole. In fact, an engineer told us that tourneys were not even seriously evaluated due to a perceived difficulty in determining appropriate payback. On top of this, there is a myriad of additional problems with Kozai's audit that could never withstand serious scrutiny. Fortunately for Kozai/Ryan, it never had to. The DGE actually references the Kahnawake Gaming Commission as if it were a real and serious entity, yet the fact that two serious frauds occurred under their watch and then the companies involved showed up on Black Friday without player funds is just silly. If the DGE relies on the KGC report, then players are in for a tough sled under US regulation. The fact is the KGC allowed Kozai (an insider with a considerable amount of Excapsa stock) to perform the only true and complete audit with no real oversight. When players demanded the ability to self-audit, a significant data-loss mysteriously arrived to prevent it from happening.

There are numerous questions that flow from that. Why were the HHs chopped up to remove hands where players were not involved? This one trick would effectively/severely limit the ability of players to determine refund validity. How were the superusing accounts truly identified? We were told the list prepared by Leggett (mostly generated from 2+2 threads) was the basis. But there were multiple AuditMonster accounts and the KGC reported that only the one Hamilton had access to, cheated. Makar swears that additional non-named accounts were left out.

Why is it so important that former UltimateBet people be given a pass? Why can't they just take their winnings and quietly go away? Why should they of all people be allowed to extract additional profits from a poker community that seemingly engages in a Sisyphean battle each and every day?

Their casino site in its present form is just a turnkey Amaya that offers little or no differentiation from other NJ platforms. It seems Pala will launch a proprietary poker platform in 2015.

We saw how well an unestablished poker platform and name went over in NJ with Ultimate Poker, even with the site throwing millions in promos and overlays at it. The losses in the NJ market are probably what caused Ultimate Gaming to go under.

Betfair can't get a poker game, even though it has a decent first deposit bonus, rake structure, and VIP program. Golden Nugget, which offers a live poker room in AC, never bothered to open the announced online poker room even though they had access to the Betfair network and a pool of live players to market.

The possibility of PokerStars getting approved one day just makes the market even more difficult.

I feel Pala will be at a massive disadvantage in the NJ market, even without the UB baggage, based on the fact that more established players with first mover advantage have struggled or outright failed.

But NJ isn't important in and of itself. NJ is the imprimatur to help California and other states overlook the sins of the past as legalized gaming rolls out. Just as DGE relied on the KGC, so will others rely on the DGE for cover when they let the UltimateBet team back in.

If the antis don't use this situation as a reason to add fuel to the opposition's fire and get the federal ban through Congress that they want so bad. I fear and maybe even predict that an Adelson-backed op-ed mentions this situation in the near future. There really won't be any way to rebut it either.

I legit lol'd after reading this. I can't fathom anyone ever playing poker online safely in the next 10 years. How amazingly better everything was in a free market prior to
Black Friday is sad to remember . Literally still laughing at how bad this is for poker....

Makes me livid. Anyone involved @UB should be shunned from every poker/business venture. Too bad UB was always such a POS company maybe pokerstars would of bailed us out like they did with fulltilt.