It doesn't have to be 2p2 (or leggett for that matter). It can be pokerroad or UB.com for all I care. I just want to set something up where people like Haley and mookman can ask questions and expect answers. UB can have full control over who's invited and set whatever rules they like.

If Sebok means it when he says that an open, respectful dialogue between UB and the poker community is in everyone's best interest (and I believe he sincerely does) then I see no reason he wouldn't work with me to set this up.

Haven't you acknowledged yourself that they tried to cover up the scandal at first? Doesn't that count as "actively help[ing] the individuals who cheated to.. get away with it" AND "attempt[ing] to hide facts to pay less money out in refunds"?

i will urge him to do so. i hope it will help, as i always do. i will attempt to get him to and also to set it up if he does agree.

my fear is that if he says anything other than, "you're right. we are liars and crooks" though that he will simply be called a liar. because of this he will probably be told not to do so, just as i was told not to come here initially.

all good points, tom + haley. i will also be urge paul to answer these questions as well. hopefully in his own forum, or perhaps new interview...? see what we can do.

Joe:

He should answer them here. 2+2 is where the poker community is, and since it's important that as many people as possible get the correct answers, that's why you started this thread isn't it? this is obviously the place to do it.

We could also probably set up an interview on our 2+2 PokerCast. Mike and Adam are the best in the business (and I assume they would be okay with the interview), and I can assure you that the interview will be done in a completely professional manner, but the tough questions will be asked.

By the way Joe, if this isn't acceptable, then my suggestion would be for you to reconsider your participation here. After all, you're representing Ultimate Bet, and by coming to 2+2 are reaching as many people in the poker community as possible.

Mason

it's a complicated issue. there is a lot of reason to believe he has lied in the past and will continue to lie in the future. that is, essentially, the issue that people want to discuss. people will not take him at his word and will ask him to provide evidence to support any assertions he makes.

i think a respectful and productive dialogue can be had even if people are not inclined to trust him. you're not going to be dealing with the typical NVGtards saying "You're a lying scumbag, die in a grease fire." You will be dealing with well informed, articulate people saying "You said X. I believe that is false for Y and Z reasons."

i think an openended, written dialogue would be much better. something like an NVG thread that only an approved list of a dozen people or so can post in. it's too easy to dodge questions, provide half answers, and promise to look into things in a real time, spoken interview.

I really don't know. Get it started, see where it goes. If there's anything they're willing to talk about there will be interesting questions to ask. If it ends with Legget or whoever else UB appoints to the task just stonewalling and refusing to comment on anything, I don't think anyone is worse off than they currently are.

This is exactly what I'm suggesting as well, in case I wasn't clear.

The longer UB stays open and the longer all this can be dragged out the more money they are all making. It's only still around because of the unique catch 22 dynamic of poker, educated players leaving means higher concentration of fish, attracts back educated players.

If this happened to any other company they would be dragged through the courts and would be starved of any income pretty quickly from the public.

I think what would be best for the poker community is to completely amputate them, have them shut down and chase anyone legally responsible, and then working on repairing what damage they caused. Being constantly strung along by management only serves them, nothing good can ever come of it. They've had their chance(s) to come clean and repeatedly failed to. It's a complete and utter dismal failure. I don't trust any of them, and with good reasons.

There is pretty much nothing I could ever read or hear from anyone associated with UB to change this anymore.

"However, neither Phil nor Annie now has regular contact with Greg Pierson."

quote is from the link.... at what time period is this know?

btw joe i wasnt saying that paul should disclose cereus' owners to 2p2- just saying u should ask him to do that to you personally (and give your word u wont repeat it). Then u can see for urself if you think the story adds up. I personally think that in this case we (me/u mebbe not public) have similar information and ur not evaluating it right- but i could be wrong and id love for u to have more information and then tell people what you think instead of being fed either vry poorly supported truth, or- (more likely imo) company propaganda.

What? Seriously? Let's be clear on this. Haley, mook and others are investigating the cheating and coming up with new information about what happened. That's what you said you were going to do. They are doing your job. In their spare time. Without inside access to UB's information like you have.

But you "can't touch the time" they spend on it? I need to repeat this it's so incredible, you don't have the time to do your job that other people do in their spare hours. What do you do all day?

Hi budblown:

While what you say is true, I don't agree that's why the "dialogue should 100% be on 2+2.

The reason why it should be on 2+2, is that in my opinion, our site is now essentially the discussion center of everything poker. I don't make this statement lightly, and it's not just being said because I also happen to own 2+2. It's what I truly believe and suspect that most everyone else now agrees as well. It's also my opinion that Joe essentially agrees with this and that's why he came here -- to communicate with the most people possible -- so let's do it right.

Best wishes,
mason

This decision would be up to Mike and Adam, but I suspect a better way would be for them to consult first with Haley and Mookman, as well as the site, and then for Mike and Adam to ask the questions.

Best wishes,
mason

There is no agenda here. I don't know if anything will be gained and in fact doubt that would be the case. But there should be plenty of interest, so why not give it a shot.

Best wishes,
mason

Joe:

In recent online radio interviews you have given, you have made it quite clear that you fully support the bringing to light of any yet-uncovered information relative to the UB cheating scandal.

Shortly after the recent release of an internal UB email by Travis Makar purporting to be the dissemination of a tool to allow cheating to occur, members of the internet poker forum community with technical expertise and software security research background took a closer look at various old and obsolete copies of the UB client software and discovered extremely interesting information, specifically the insight that these client software programs appeared to look for the presence of "special" or "secret" registry keys on startup, the names of which are the cause of much suspicion and question as to what exactly their purpose was.

In light of the history of a known cheating scandal to have occurred in the timeframe of these now obsolete software programs looking at registry keys like "SuperAllah7462" and "XR71BlackBird", it is appropriate to determine one way or the other, and answer the question of whether this curiosity in the old UB client software is meaningless, or whether it was a "trigger" of some sort to the ability to use the then publicly-available client software to cheat.

I'm sure you would agree, if this "cheating" mechanism was in fact implemented in such a way that individuals unconnected to UB could theoretically have discovered it and used it during the time the software was in production, it would be a most serious and disturbing revelation, as we would perhaps, then, never be able to truly know the extent of the cheating which occurred or the amount of money stolen from innocent players.

Assuming this was not the case, it would surely be in the best interest of UB to put that theory soundly to rest, even if it means acknowledging the specific cheating method that cheating was implemented in the old UB software (perhaps requiring not just this "registry hack" but also the knowledge of a special logon and password, as is the most commonly believed theory as to what happened).

As such, Joe, it would be a noble gesture if you could arrange for the original source code from the now-obsolete and unusable Ultimate Bet client software to be made available for independent review and analysis by those in the internet poker forum community who have discovered the curiosity in this software, but who cannot determine to any further extent the purpose behind these suspicious findings without access to the full client software source code history from 2002-2005.

Surely such review would not be a security risk to UB since the software in question has long since been rendered obsolete, and we assume that if cheating capabilities were discovered in analysis of this software, that it would have no value today. This seems like a win-win prospect for UB as a company, the customer base past and present of UB, and the poker community in general.

Please give this request your consideration.

joe,

i've been a big supporter of UB in the past. i've mostly kept out of this stuff, mostly because i just don't know what to think.

the biggest surprise that has come out of this thread is just how little you appear to know about the whole scandal. i believe you are an honest person and i don't think you are hiding anything.

it's one thing to work for a faceless corporation that hasn't ever been involved in huge public scandals. yeah, you probably aren't going to know the owners of that company.

but if you get involved with a company that has had serious trust/integrity issues and one of that companies' main claims is that it was previous rogue ownership and now none of those people are involved with the new company, but you have no idea who the owners are....well that just doesn't add up.

my opinion: UB brought you on to help attract new players to the site and to bring a reputable guy on the pro team to represent the company. you have/had a good name in the community and from a strategic perspective, that makes sense. i just hope you spend some time thinking about whether or not you were brought on to do the job you told the community you were doing.

Joe,

Specific UB question:

2yung2fast was one of my favorite UB fish. he was super tilty, played fast, aggro, etc. classic UB high stakes fish of the day. i was SHOCKED to see that he turned out to be a superuser.

case in point: http://www.pocketfives.com/f7/check-hand-who-guy-96903/

this hand is from early 2005 and if you look at post 2, this guy is NOT CHEATING. he pays off a board that no guy who can see your hole cards would ever pay off.

okay, but he was listed as one of the cheaters: http://www.tokwiro.com/tokwiro-responds-to-kgc.asp

what do i gather from this? he wasn't ALWAYS cheating. no way this guy was always cheating.

why is this important? you guys netted the results of WINS and LOSSES vs the cheaters. i played against roughly half of the cheating accounts. there is zero doubt in my mind that i beat some of the cheaters fair and square and those wins were netted off the losses that i incurred to actual cheaters.

the argument could be made that maybe i lost to some of these guys fair and square and shouldn't have been refunded in some cases? well first, i think that's just the price you pay when there is a massive scandal on your site and you can't prove stuff. but also, playing against these cheaters when they weren't cheating was like fishing with dynamite, -- they were HORRIBLE. sure, they could beat me in the short run and some probably did, but by and large i smoked these guys.

I agree. This is a complex morass of facts and only someone who has spent hundreds of hours on it would be qualified to question the UB principals.

As to Taylor's netting point, netting is debatable in general here and certainly shouldn't be done across superusing and non-superusing sessions of the same player. Yet another reason that the independent investigation/audit that people have been demanding for years now should have been done.

to me, everything joe has posted in this thread reeks of someone who needs their UB contract to pay the bills and who is trying to hold onto that life line by keeping their eyes closed as tightly as possible. am i remembering wrong, or did you not promise to investigate the superuser scandal and provide answers/transparency when you signed with ub? it seems like you have done little to no investigation of your own, instead shifting the burden of proving UB's lies to 2+2 and blindly trusting things told to you by others who have been caught lying on this subject in the past.

there are a lot of seemingly simple questions that have been asked in this thread and others, ones that a clean and reformed company should have no problem answering, and yet all we have is silence from the CEO and i dunnos from you. when someone like durrrr comes into this thread and tells you you need to search out more information and re-assess your involvement, i hope you will take that as a sign that you're probably not standing on the firm ground you think you are. it just doesn't make any sense to me that you have so little information and so few answers, yet continue to represent and support this company with such a checkered past.

Taylor I agree with this. There is 0% chance 2yung2fast was a superuser around 2004 - 2005. I won quite a bit from him and he was as you said a really horrible fish. One of the reasons I adamantly asked for (and never received) my total UB hand history was because of the very issue you described above.

I pretty much gave up all hope that they'd ever do the right thing and send me my hand histories and am just grateful that the 2+2 detectives did the work that they did because its clear to me that UB would never do the right thing on their own.

It's also comical to me that of all the poker sites, the only site that has a veil of uncertainty around its ownership is the UB+AP brand.

Everyone knows who owns Pokerstars and FullTilt, but AP+UB the site with easily the most checkered past in the history of online gaming, and they have spent more time obfuscating its ownership than it has trying to make good on its past transgressions.

There's a reason why trials aren't conducted in writing. People who are being evasive/dishonest need to be put on the spot. When they say something that's not true, they need to be asked follow up questions immediately. While it may be true that the facts are so bad for UB that they couldn't possibly come up with good written answers (I believe this to be the case), letting them do it in writing creates a lot more opportunity for maneuvering, creativity and evasiveness.

But people have been clamoring for answers from UB for many years. The likelihood that they're suddenly going to be forthcoming in writing or in an interview is zero IMO.

I think you are really off on this one. You say it warranted an apology, but Joe never gave a real apology. You again blame the victim who had no obligation to keep a disgusting message sent to him by a UB employee about UB private, or even to handle it privately.

And if you don't see Joe's second threat as a threat, you aren't reading it clearly. He was clearly telling FE the dirt Joe has on FE's girlfriend will be publicly released very quickly if FE doesn't STFU.

The worst part isn't that you quickly praised Joe's original non-apology, it's giving him a free pass when he immediately attacks his victims again. I'm disappointed in you GT.

Let's review what Joe really "apologized for".

Notice he doesn't apologize to Jon, the girlfriend, or give specifics of why the DM was over the line. He mentions himself repeatedly, but shows not empathy for how the people who received that threatening DM must have felt. He just apologizes to no one in particular for behaving less than perfectly without really saying what he did that was wrong.

It's all about Joe. No empathy about how Jon should feel when a near stranger who represents UB sends him ominous message about his GF. In fact, Joe has to try to make it Jon's fault because childish Joe thinks making UB related threats should be protected by some veil of secrecy.

Again, the original message can only be interpreted in two ways, either a blackmail attempt, or a request for FE to back off because UB has skeletons in it's closet Joe doesn't want talked about. Joe saying it wasn't a blackmail attempt doesn't count for much, because his whole apology so far is so insincere, it's almost dishonest.

Again, it's how Joe feels and felt, and his attempt to avoid getting his ass beat. No empathy, no real apology to his direct victims.

I mean, COME ON! Joe actually had the balls to end by insinuating Jon should apologize for not keeping Joes douchey UB threat secret.

Joe's "apology" was thin air and misdirection. He apologized to the world in general for some slight personal failings, without being too specific about how slimy he was, and only mentioning the victims to point the finger of blame in their direction.

Then the coup de grace.

Joe ignores the fact that the GF's stress was created by the original DM, not the posting of it publicly. Or does he think that veiled threats by a public figure to expose her "secret" shouldn't bother her as long as no one else knows?

Again, it's all about Joe. FE posted one short message asking why Joe brought the GF into it at all, and he lashes out immediately with another threat. Clearly Joe will never give them any legitimate apology. He's narcissistic, and delusional, and blaming FE for his own mess created from that "poorly worded" DM. Joe has some childish belief that he can behave as horribly as he wants and people will cover for him, and if someone he mistreats reveals it publicly THEY are the problem, not Joe and his behavior.

I'm not sure why anyone wants to ask Joe questions about UB at all. He clearly knows nothing, and has done nothing to get to the bottom of even basic UB questions. He's a front man taking a desperately needed paycheck, and clearly can never unbias himself enough to expose any of his employer's shortcomings.

But worse is, there is no need to ask UB questions either. They are clearly still corrupt. If they were legit they would have answered these questions clearly eons ago. Clearly they don't answer the questions because the answers would indict current ownership and management. Their behavior is perfect proof of the answers, so why do we still keep asking questions?

The real question for Mason is why isn't UB banned from advertising on 2+2, and listed prominently on the top of every forum on 2+2 as an outlaw site, with a warning it's not safe to play there or trust UB with your money?

Don't we have some obligation to the general poker community to keep players from unknowingly depositing money on shady sites?

We have no monetary ties to UB and would not accept any advertising from them. This statement and similar ones in other posts are wrong.

MM