This statement has to be followed up on. Are you asserting that there have been similar incidents to the UB scandal on other online poker sites?(other than AP) If so, it is a serious accusation that needs to backed up.

Or you are lumping players cheating other players (collusion, MA etc..) into the same category as a poker site stealing from its' customers?

I read it as the latter, but it would be good for Joe to clarify.

The current UB ownership has access to the now obsolete software source code used in 2003.

There exists significant evidence which has been made public suggesting the client software contained a "God Mode" function.

It is not clear whether there needed special user accounts to use this "god mode" or not.

Explaining the mysterious behavior of the old UB client makes the difference between the current narrative of the scope of the UB cheating being credible versus it being a wild guess.

Open that source code for independent review.

Release the identities of "superallah7462" and co.

Let those with open grievances go after those parties, and perhaps some progress can truly be made rebuilding the UB brand.

Yeah, this. Hellmuth and Duke used to make similar "it-happens-at-every-other-site" arguments back when they were the lead sponsored pros over there. Sure, cheating (or T&C violations) has happened at other sites, but cheating by the company itself is a rarer bird -- a distinction they somehow miss.

Some would say it's a tad ironic to hear Joe use this argument, given that he took issue of Annie doing so in her PokerRoad Radio interview back in July of 2008 ("WSOP08 w/ Don Cheadle & Annie Duke 7-10-08"):

Ed's Note: at this point, Duke had put forth the notion that UB's ownership did not cheat its customers nor did it develop software to enable the cheating.

[wait for laughter]


ALI NEJAD: Obviously, as an online player, you do place a great deal of faith in a company to protect you from these sorts of shenanigans.

DUKE: Absolutely, no question. And the one thing that needs to be made really clear is this: in the end, there have been problems on every single site. There is not a site which hasn't had problems. Okay?

SEBOK: Well, I don't know if that's fair- [interrupted]

NEJAD: To be fair, though- [interrupted]

DUKE: No, that's absolutely true.

SEBOK: Hold on, hold on one sec- [interrupted]

DUKE: I'm not saying that they necessarily had this problem.

SEBOK: Well, that's the thing- [interrupted]

DUKE: There is no site that hasn't had large refunds occur - [interrupted]

SEBOK: No, no, no, of course. But I think it's difficult to make that across-the-board statement.

NEJAD: And not on this scale.

[wait for laughter]

But I digress.

MJ, speaking purely on logistics, how much of a possibility exists of having Leggett as a return guest on the PokerCast in such a way that designated individuals (e.g. Mookman, ElevenGrover, Haley) could be on hand to offer follow-up questions?

Maybe it would be via chat or even a "listen line" -- some form of live, interactive mechanism. Not that you and Adam are not perfectly capable of conducting such an interview on your own, but we can all agree that Mook/EG/Haley/Nat/et al have information that no one else has, and thus can give questions more foundation than anyone else can. Someone in this thread made the analogy of the direct/redirect and cross/recross procedures of a court room.

I know many have jumped on Mason Malmuth for suggesting your show, but until there is a HaleyRoad Radio, Mookdown.com or The Grover Beat, the 2+2 PokerCast really is the most appropriate and most plausible place for such a conversation to take place.

Hi Joe,
I know that you're busy, so I've compiled a list of posts that you can respond to easily that you seem to have overlooked. They're all posts directed to you about your own actions, statements or beliefs, and therefore certainly fall into your realm of expertise. In fact, most of them are simply asking you to elaborate on your own statements. They're all also quite relevant and certainly deserve your response.

I've listed them in my own order of precedence in case you don't have time to answer them all. So, please start at the top and work your way down.

(Mods, please feel free to add to this as you see fit.)

1) ElevenGrover

2) NoahSD

3) Mookman

(If a mod could grab the original mookman post from here and drop it in place of this text, I'd appreciate it. I can't quote posts in locked threads, and there's too many links to make copy + pasting useful.)

4) Jordan Morgan

5) NoahSD

(I added a bit to that for clarity.)

6) superleeds

7) Bobo Fett

^^^^ To clarify the above, Bobbo is talking about paid shills who do not openly represent the company, not reps who do. For example, Stars has reps here whose screen names are things like PokerStarsSteve, whereas UB had shills whose screen names and posting history did not identify them as UB shills.

8) Mike Johnson

joe,

when 2+2'ers talk smack about the company that ADMITTEDLY took millions from its customers, someone paid by the company to be a sponsored pro tells 2+2'ers in private to shut up about their UB hate. not only is that not your place it's definitely NO ONE'S place to tell us to shut up about the UB hate, considering you guys stole millions and have tried to sweep the thing under the mat instead of fully refunding the players in a timely fashion. i haven't seen you even say "yeah i'm sorry for trying to end your negative discourse about a criminal company like UB" despite the fact that i think more ppl were pissed about that, than your threat against jon and his gf.

you claim to be this good guy who is going to clean up UB and refund us all, and get us the HH's we requested years ago... yet you're a PAID UB employee, and i'm assuming it's not exactly in your contract to continue to feed information to people who hate UB. i don't see how it's in your best interest to help anyone here when the company you're trying to dig up dirt on is paying you salary. and thus far as an employee at UB, i don't think anyone would say you've done good for the poker community.

i think you should quit defending UB, quit attacking 2+2'ers, and quit acting like UB doesn't "owe" anything to the community when they CLEARLY do. i also think you and every other UB pro should use their heads, realize the company patch they are wearing represents a bunch of crooks, and quit representing them (or at least act more professional, and possibly not DM people on twitter threatening them). i have an immense amount of respect i didn't have before for PHIL HELLMUTH because he was wise enough to kick UB to the curb.

i think the simple fact that you felt the need to tell ANYONE in the community to drop the UB hate is gross and disgusting. why did you even think it was your job to do that in the first place?

please do yourself a favor, read the post noah just outlined, dig up all the info you can on these crooks that you clearly haven't even tried to read at this point, and educate yourself about UB. you need it.

Joe,

Why hasn't UB sued Russ Hamilton, does he have dirt on current management he will release if he is sued?? When i played with him in Florida he rambled about how i wouldn't be talking **** to him if i knew what he knew as he was racking up and leaving and something about "why haven't i been charged".

It seems like UB has a slam dunk case against Russ unless they are worried that it would lead to public accusations with evidence against unknown elements of the cheating operation.

Fair points that PokerStars didn't act perfectly, but turning a blind eye on illegal activities and actually engaging in illegal activities are two completely different levels of wrongdoing. UB did the latter.

If you want to truly put the Stars bot problem and the UB scandal on the same footing, you'd need amend the Stars story as follows:

a) the Stars executives creates bots and uses the bots to siphon money of its customers;
b) once caught, Stars denies the existence of the bots;
c) once the denial is proven false, Stars acknowledges the existence of the bots but claim without evidence that the bots no longer exist;
d) Stars conducts its own investigation and determines which accounts were bots (but doesn't immediately release said account names), then pays out refunds for this activity;
e) Stars pats itself on the back for issuing refunds;
f) Stars claims, but cannot demonstrate, that those guilty of the bot creation/use/profit are no longer with the company ("the New Stars");
g) Stars inexplicably loses data that could prove or disprove other accounts;
h) Stars changes its name to Astros and changes its logo from a spade to a club to further distance itself from its past transgressions;
i) Stars hires Justin Bieber as sponsored pro to attract new users. Millions of followers!

Edit: I took too long to write this. RolloTomasi beat me to it. GG, WP.

Thank you, Noah, for compiling these together for me. It makes it much easier to answer them all at once. -JS

1) ElevenGrover


UB has always been in a position where we can't just name who we would want to name in some situations. It's certainly plausible that we have information, account names, etc that would help to crack the case, or at least lead to people who can help crack it. We simply can't release that information as we would like in some cases because of liability issues and also because we don't always know how it all fits together and we would be taking the chance of releasing information about people who may be completely innocent as well.

A lot of these questions are obviously better suited for UB management as well.

I have no idea why you think that I tried to get PokerNews to write a favorable story for me. I never pressured them in any way to do so. We talked about them doing the story initially, rather than WickedChopsPoker, but they passed eventually. I think the issue was a little hot for them at the time.

I enlisted Mook to work on a project with me. I informed him it was "for our eyes only". He ended up releasing much of the information that we were working on together. He has since apologized to me. That's all I can really say about that.

2) NoahSD

When I first signed I said I wanted to accomplish three things: 1. Release all the account names, 2. Get the hand histories out, and 3. Get as many of the physical names out as possible of cheaters or co-conspirators.

We immediately released the accounts that were associated with the cheaters. Most agree with this although those that don't, cite not trusting UB at all and thus not trusting anything released. You can see the impossible situation that puts me in.

The HH's have obviously proven to be much more difficult. I have worked with many players on getting their HH's from the cheating times out to them. Most were great. A few were very clearly trying to get money where they could never have played the cheaters (played too small, etc.). Then we ran into the HH's hurdles which were that some were incomplete, couldn't find some, etc. That seems to have been mostly explained by equipment failure and the belief that the cheaters may have altered/deleted, etc some of the HH's. This story seems to be corroborated by both Haley + Travis Makar.
At this point, I wasn't sure how much further I could take this. I am still happy to chase down people's HH's for them (Jordan Morgan, etc.) but I couldn't create HH's where it seemed they had been lost or destroyed. I thought I had done all I could regarding the HH's at this point.

Now, we worked very hard to get as many of the physical names out as we possibly could. I approached a few different sites about working on this with me (never considering PokerRoad, as it's obvious that there would be a perceived conflict of interest there), but many of them balked. I eventually settled on WickedChopsPoker, who were very interested in doing most of the legwork/interviews/chasing people down for the story. It's common knowledge that WCP are good friends of mine, so I didn't love that idea because of the perception it would create, but they are all smart, honest guys and I had no other options. We worked for about two months on gathering information and put together what we had from those that would talk to us, creating what I believe to be the most accurate story out today. Are there more people involved? I'm sure there are, but we couldn't find them. There is no doubt that there's more info out there, but we would need to sit down with different people, people who wouldn't sit down with us. At this point, I felt that, as much as I could do, had been done in this arena now. I don't think that I could personally take it any further.

I am happy with what was able to be accomplished? Yes. Is it perfect? No. This whole issue isn't perfect though. There are many twists and turns. Some of which are well known, and some of which are not, but I was happy with what we were able to release and I don't feel that I have lied to everyone in terms of what I said I wanted to get done. I think I did that, as well as I could do that.

3) Mookman

(If a mod could grab the original mookman post from here and drop it in place of this text, I'd appreciate it. I can't quote posts in locked threads, and there's too many links to make copy + pasting useful.)

This is certainly a question that is much better suited for UB management, and I am working on getting them here. What I am mainly personally referencing was not coming clean when it all went down immediately and just being honest, rather than trying to deal with it all internally and panicking a bit about things.


4) Jordan Morgan

I don't feel attacked, Jordan. No worries. I appreciate you saying that though.

I have had countless conversations with Paul regarding all aspects of the scandal, how it's been dealt with, how we continue to deal with it, etc. We have had some extremely personal and frank conversations about all of this and other things, as well. At this point, through those talks I have decided to put my faith in Paul and believe him on points that I personally could never know the definitive answers to from the past. With that said, you are definitely right that there is a possibility that he has been lying to me all the time and this is all a massive coverup of epic proportions. I have to minimally allow for that in my brain, obviously. I don't believe that to be the case though. Has this required me putting a ton of faith in Paul. Yes, absolutely. If it all came out that he had been lying to me all along, would I be crushed? Definitely. At some level we all put a certain amount of faith in our employers/bosses/companies and I have done the same here. I might be wrong, but I don't believe that I am.

I think that the burden of proof question is a tricky one. A lot of ways that things could be "proven" are things like letting people see all the investor records, opening up the entire books of the company, etc, which are just things that can't happen for many other business reasons other than trying to coverup a cheating scandal. Because of this, I think we are in a strange grey area as far as all this goes. I think all of the ways that most of this can be proven, from UB's side, have been done. I really like the idea of bringing in a third party audit of the company and keeping it confidential. I don't know how feasible this is from a business standpoint. I also don't know if it would appease people. Many times I think that will appease people when discussing UB, and rightfully so. There's a reason for all the anger. I understand that.

5) NoahSD

(I added a bit to that for clarity.)

I think that that email surfacing helped Paul in the sense that it corroborated his story of not paying BWDD, which many had said was a lie. Paul had never told me that he didn't talk to BWDD or email him or anything like that. When something of this magnitude happens, I think that most people in that position would at least consider every angle. I have had a blackmail situation myself, where I had done nothing wrong whatsoever, but I said I would pay, tried to keep the person on the hook for a while, and thought of every possible way to deal with it. Because of this I don't think it's a surprise that Paul did the same in that situation.
6) superleeds

I wasn't working for UB when this became public. Paul obviously knew about this before I did, and I found out about it in more detail when I signed and got more involved.


7) Bobo Fett

I was in no way talking about any other specific companies, in poker or out of it. I was generally speaking of the practice of this. I don't like it and I don't think it's something that us, or any other company, should be doing. I do not know of UB doing it specifically though, other than what has been posted here. I did mention it to Paul and he said he only knew of it happening once and he reprimanded the person, as it was a VIP member apparently.

^^^^ To clarify the above, Bobbo is talking about paid shills who do not openly represent the company, not reps who do. For example, Stars has reps here whose screen names are things like PokerStarsSteve, whereas UB had shills whose screen names and posting history did not identify them as UB shills.

8) Mike Johnson

I am talking about collusion, etc. I have no knowledge of any other "inside jobs" or anything near the magnitude of what has happened at UB/AP. I was generally commenting on the practice of most any company, in or out of poker, of trying to handle things internally to cause less of a stir. I think this is pretty common.

I am glad you posted to a link to the post I made, would sure love to get some answers if possible. Here is a link to that post. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...1&postcount=94

However, I realized I included the wrong link when I said this Here is a post I made on PokerRoad that contains a link to Uri explaining his methodology. Seems it was pretty thorough to me.

The link I meant to post was this link http://www.pokerroad.com/forums/117630-post77.html

I am not sure if the mods can edit it in to the original post.

I think this is important b/c it pins testimony from Uri Kozai who said the databases were complete, versus the now 10% missing coming from Leggett. Any efforts to contact Uri have gone without a reply.

Does Real Time Edge Software, RTE, still do any work for Cereus/UB?
Here is a link to their website, http://rtedge.ca/ It is the only way I have found to contact Uri. There are also many other former/current RTE employees/engineers who used to work for UB. Again, is RTE still involved in helping with the software currently?

I am sure I am missing more, but this is what came to mind right now. Thanks.

Joe, thank you for your response.

The issues of what you did with the data can wait, assuming you plan to continue the dialog. You state you cannot release data owing to liability issues. The problem is you did release data. We had no idea Ron Saccavino or Natalie DiGioia played any role until you released their names (attached to UB proprietary account information). How did you get these names? Why did you release their confidential information if there are liabilities? Help me to understand what happened here. Somebody in your firm determined these folks along with the Makars, Bajayo, Novinskey and Curtis should be made fair game. How can there be LESS liability throwing them on the fire without providing the backup data to prove the extent of their participation?

That information was not officially or formally released. I touched upon that with my answer regarding Mook above. I enlisted his help on a project and he decided to release some of the information we were working on without my consent. That's really all I can say about that. I'm sorry.

The idea that these sites nowadays need to remain anonymous and the owners of the sites can never really be known is a bit of baloney. Like I said before everyone knows who owns Pokerstars, same goes for (to a certain extent) FT.

Pokerstars opens up their books for the state of nevada and enters into a partnership agreement with the Wynn. UB+AP create a series of shell corporations and then create a fake sale to a native Canadian who used to be the Chief in Kahnawake.

This whole thing is really becoming absurd.

Fair enough, but you somehow came upon a list of names not yet outed and for whatever reason planned to work with others to "put meat on the skeleton" I believe were your words.

In other words, your thought process was to ask outsiders to provide more info on these names. Shouldn't the question have been (and really still should be) directed inward to your own authoritative data sources?

The milk is already spilled and as I suggested, the liability seems greater naming them without corroboration. Paul says he wants to find some method to get info to the authorities, isn't this it?

It is likely many of these names are not cheaters, but they have some connection to the case and it is that guilt which can be employed to reach the larger fish up the food chain.

Were any names on this list different from the names publicly available on 2p2?

Why is this your job? Isn't that an obvious job for support (at) ub (dot) com?

Do you have access to the hand history files that UB stores?

First of all, most of the names that you released were obviously fake, Joe. What were you doing for two months that didn't include checking to make sure that the people that you were accusing of cheating were actually people?

Second, and more important, why did you need wicked chops? Doesn't UB have a security department? (That's rhetorical. I happen to know that they do.) Don't those people have access to lots of information that WCP does not? Aren't those people professionals at this sort of thing? Did you ask UB for help? If so, what did they say?

A company that wants the truth to come out and is sitting on tons of information doesn't higher some poker pro to go work with some third-rate poker news site to look into this stuff. That sort of company would do it themselves.


Just stop making these arguments, Joe.

When you say "Sure, we did this, but so does everybody else", nobody's going to think "Oh, ok. Let's leave the guys who tried to cover up the multimillion-dollar robbery alone because Joe says that everybody tries to cover things up." Similarly when you send DMs to people who have been insulting your company on twitter telling them to STFU because they have skeletons too, doing you really think that your head's on straight?

Those kinds of arguments are completely invalid. The fact that other people do scummy things as well doesn't make up for the scummy **** that your bosses have done.

Then there's also the fact that in every case you've been wrong. Jon had no skeletons in his closet, and he was so confident of that fact that he posted the thing on 2p2 and asked you to say exactly what they were. Other rooms don't have shills working here; the people whose job it is to keep this forum clean have found tons of Cereus shills, but nobody from any other site. Only Cereus employees are stupid and nefarious enough to try **** like that.

And, finally, the other major sites don't cover up cheating scandals. There have been some baseless accusations to argue otherwise on this forum, but there is not a single example of Stars or FTP actually attempting to sweep a cheating scandal under the rug. Your bosses did.

So, please please stop making this argument. You're throwing out baseless accusations and spreading misinformation and making yourself look like a clown in the process. Admittedly, what you're saying is not nearly as stupid as hellmuth's ******ed "pot's get shipped to the wrong player all the time", but it's certainly a hell of a lot more hurtful since you're accusing people of fairly seriously things that they have never done (and that your bosses have done).

Guessing that you may be done for the evening, I will extend in hopes of answers tomorrow. Noah has also followed up so I am interested in those answers as well.

There was a long period between your contacting Mookman and the WCP article. According to Mook, not much was spent investigating through him. Assuming this time was spent with Steve Priess and the WCP team, can you explain why the WCP articles had so many factual challenges? (for example, in one segment they referenced a preliminary report and thus reported incorrect cheating dates).

Second, did you vet WCP conclusions with Cereus/Paul to verify or cross check their info against the account data I have referenced multiple times in my questions? (in other words, if you couldn't get the data directly from Paul, did Paul verify your outside findings? It would seem ****ty if he allowed you to ratify a conclusion when he knew the finding was incorrect.)

Third, and I would like to dial in on this. WCP reported Travis Makar was a significant entity in the scandal. They said "in essence, Travis Makar is the Verbal Kent of the UltimateBet scandal". Explaining the reference, Verbal Kint was also known as "the man with the plan" in the excellent film Usual Suspects. Also the alter ego for the master villain, Kaiser Soze. One line says Travis owned property directly linked (to) IP addresses associated with cheating accounts. IP addresses of cheating accounts are EXACTLY the kind of information which must come from within the corporation. It appears WCP was provided access to this info, or at least confirmation of same.

Now, Mr. Makar has surfaced and your company is calling on him to help resolve the scandal. Forgive me, but I cannot fathom what information Makar might possess that your corporation doesn't trump with far more complete records authoritatively served from the company network. Moreover, if Makar does have significant participatory guilt, surely you can release his records free of liability concerns.

So my question is, will your company now release full account information, login/logout, table join/departs, financial info/withdraw/transfer and iesnare deviceprints for Account# 16054; Travis Makar (Firentexas, FlatBroke33, ilike2win)?

Thank you again for taking the time.

I think this is a really great post, and your point is one that I've been making repeatedly in private.

The fact of the matter is that current UB management covered up a huge theft and has made a ton of moves since them that show incredible amounts of negligence and a blatant disregard for integrity, both WRT the superuser scandal and just in their day-to-day handling of their company.

I mean... on Poker Stars, it's a huge scandal when bots are found. On AP, it's barely a scandal when it turns out that they spread a fake keno game, lied about how that happened, and still haven't repaid anybody 5 months later. I don't even bother to post on 2p2 when I learn about bots on Cereus (which happens about once a month), I just confirm that they're actually bots, have whoever reports them to me send security an e-mail with a list, so that security can lock the accounts and never reply to the e-mail like they always do. And I have a goddam laundry list of **** that's been reported to me that I haven't quite gotten around to vetting to my ridiculously high standards for publication, but that are almost certainly true.

So, yeah, there is no question that the current management of UB are scumbags, and to some extent, all we're doing is obscuring the forest for the trees when we devote massive threads about UB to little details like what Joe Sebok thinks about all this or whether or not UB's proverbial dog really did eat 10% of the hand histories instead of just sticking to parroting the long list of things that they've done wrong that no other site would ever consider doing. This ongoing debate about detail might lead some people (perhaps even most people) to think that there's legitimate debate as to whether or not Cereus is now a legitimate company, and that totally totally sucks.

However, the reason that people are obsessed with all this nuance is because this just ain't over yet. There's tons of stuff that we don't know, lots of people who should be in jail that aren't, and lots of people who should have been repaid but haven't. The few people who have devoted incredible amounts of time to this scandal (and I am absolutely not included in that list) are trying to right some pretty massive wrongs--much bigger than the various little things that I've devoted my own time to. Those wrongs can't simply be righted by saying repeatedly "These are the things that we know 100% Cereus has screwed up," and there's a risk that doing so would steal focus from the ongoing investigation.

That said, I think that the current climate is shifted much too far towards trees and away from forest. This is likely just because the people who used to spend their time screaming about all the big things that Cereus has done have gotten sore throats, and the people who are still involved in investigating the scandal are so used to these facts that they don't bother to mention them. I've been trying to start an effort to properly catalogue the big facts of the Cereus scandals without obsessing over the murky details, but so far I haven't found a partner in crime, and I'm not sure that I'm qualified to do it alone .

Well, that's certainly not what it sounded like when you said this:

I don't see any way to interpret this other than that you were saying you actually knew of examples of other poker sites where this had happened.

This is far from the first time that I've seen you phrase responses in a way that is either:

1. Intentionally misleading with the hope that no one notices and calls you out; or
2. A terrible choice of words.

Whichever one it is, I'd suggest you try to correct it for the future.

Nevertheless, thanks for the response, and for effectively retracting/correcting what you said earlier.

Oh, and happy birthday.

True, but as someone else has suggested, you're more than welcome to have it in your profile, aside from the location field LDO.

.

I received a refund during the first batch, and a larger refund when the second set of refunds were sent out. I didn't have to sign or do anything other than email them my wire instructions. They didn't require anyone to sign anything.

Some kind of civil action seems inevitable but there should be no illusions. Such an action would take years and a lot of money up front.

Second, to Joe. The company doesn't have to provide account information in a public data dump. You could arrange to provide data privately to allow investigators to do the legwork.

Part of the reason you did not have success with Mookman last year was his recognition more data from Cereus servers should have been available than account number and address.