Hey 2+2,
Yesterday was a bit of a debacle and in all honesty I was overwhelmed once I sat down. I'm not a forum guy, meaning I don't normally post in them, and when a few of you got a little aggressive, I got overly defensive and reacted in kind. I'm going to continue to try and post here occasionally though, as I feel it's important. I am going to take my time and respond slower to ensure I don't get defensive, regardless of the questions that come in. I will try and ignore the personal attacks.

With that said, let's try and find some common ground on some of this stuff:

1. There were many posts in this thread saying I must be an idiot to think that the original cheating ub management isn't still there. On the contrary, I don't know anyone who has kept up with the scandal who thinks the main suspects like Russ, Pierson, or Monsour are still involved. As Bob said, it's the old AP management that have questions surrounding them.

2. The hand history mystery seems to be over, yet there are numerous requests for an explanation in the thread and allegations that I didn't do what I promised. Both Haley + Travis Makar independently stated that they believe some hand histories were doctored and/or deleted before they were turned over to current ub. This, coupled with the hardware issues seems to explain the discrepencies in the HH's.

3. I was frequently criticized in this thread for not really knowing who owns Cereus. I don't think anyone really knows who owns Tilt or Stars either. We only "know" what we have been told. Howard Lederer has gone on record saying he was never involved in running Tilt, yet he was voted the most powerful person in poker. These companies are operating in a grey area in the US, so that kind of information doesn't get distributed very freely. The only people I'm sure are in management at Ub are the ones I deal with personally, Paul, Stuart Gordon, etc.

4. I understand it seems naïve to many of you that I believe what Paul Legget tells me, but his answers to me have always been consistent. For example, most of the sleuths told me to step down because there was definitive proof that brainwashdodo had been paid by Paul to keep silent about the scandal. I was called naïve for believing Paul. Yet now that the emails have surfaced, the experts admit that Paul was probably telling the truth. In all honesty, Paul has never not answered any question I have asked him, and he has always done what I asked him to do. Myself, Paul, etc have made mistakes. I've freely admitted that all along. I simply don't believe that he, or anyone else in the current company, were the real culprits that you want in all of this. I just don't. I understand all of the anger that many of you have. I feel that sometimes it is misdirected at the wrong people.

5. People want more compensation for Brad Booth and others who have been damaged by the scandal. I certainly agree that people's money has been stolen and lives may even have been ruined. However, I have never had a reason to believe the people responsible are involved in the current company. It will make my life easier when Haley, Mook, Travis and others eventually solve this. I wish we could hear the tape that Travis owns, which Paul has expressed as well. We want this information to come out. Incidentally, Travis did say that Paul was not present on that tape.

6. I have been called irrelevant in the "hunt for the ub killers" as you guys call it. In truth, I wouldn't totally disagree. I've worked off of second hand information which I have given to others who I felt could use it better than I could. I have continually asked questions in order to get answers I could write about so that others could use that information to poke into things. On numerous occasions I wondered if I was going to lose my job. There are only so many times that you can ask your boss, "Are you sure? Are you lying to me?" before he simply gets tired of hearing that. To his credit, Paul has always been patient and answered. Maybe I was guilty of setting too high of expectations for myself with you guys, as if I could personally find the cheaters and get all the information/data. Let me reset those here: I am a conduit for information. At the end of the day, I have to admit I have no power to uncover this stuff myself. With that said, I think things are many, many times improved in the last two years and we know much more information than we did. If you deem me totally irrelevant and would rather have me not post, then I understand that. For the record, most of what I do at UB no longer has to do with the scandal. I work on the marketing, pro team, social media, among other things.

7. I have gotten too defensive and made matters worse in this thread and at other times. I obviously don’t like being called a liar, cheater, scumbag, etc when I know that I am not. Also, I've screwed up in a few other ways in this thread besides being overly defensive. First, I invited questions that I couldn't answer. Secondly, I tried to reason with people who don't like me and the company I work for, and who are only reading my words to find a way to attack them. I can correct both of those, and I will.

I want to make one thing clear about Jon and his GF; I never had any intention at all of releasing anything about his GF. I feel bad that I bit on his comment yesterday.

I never meant anything I "said" to Jon to be public. It was never intended as blackmail. I was using my example to show him that I wouldn't try and embarrass him in public with anything I might know actually. According to Jon I don't even have the correct story.

So when Walt Larrick gives you confidential account info which you then send to Mookman, you consider this to be "second hand information"?

Did you consider questions of liability? Did you ask pertinent followups about more account info besides account number/address? Why won't you address this since it is the single area where you have actively participated in a meaningful fashion? If Cereus can provide names/numbers/addresses, why can't they provide the rest of the data?

It really is time to drop the Jon issue. Every statement you make on it is laughable. You waste a lot of time apologising or backtracking then reverse it all with a snide incriminating remark.

Did you ask Leggert why the complete set of HH's for any individual could not be released to those asking for them?

Have his responses, to you or in public announcements, been consistant over the period you have been there?

wow, so this means we can definitely expect paul to enter into a public free-form written exchange with a few selected 2+2 members, if you ask him to, right?
cuz if not, that would be the first time he ever didn't do what you asked him to, according to you.

oh so what you're saying is that you're no longer doing what you originally told us you'd be doing and are instead doing what we all expected they hired you for in the first place.
and you're doing this even tho you said if you didn't get things done with the scandal you'd quit, but you didn't get things done, and you still haven't quit.

just wanna make sure i understand correctly.

I don't give a crap about any of this high school drama. Find out who the other superusers were and release the names.

Thanks Joe, just wanted to express my gratitude towards your decision to create these threads.

In my limited personal interactions with you during the 2007 WSOP when I was interning for CardPlayer, you were very welcoming and willing to "show me the ropes" of the WSOP scene within minutes of meeting.

I will always be a fan of your media work and play and know you will break your 7th-Bok curse very soon!

-Zach

part2 ? wot?

as for HH'S any chance of getting them. Also it was posted somewhere joe said if he couldn't get them he would leave UB? ...umm

I would like to clarify some issues regarding the missing hand histories and ask some potentially relevant questions in response to UB's official statement. If you are interested in my background, I am a casual amateur poker player but I have been a network administrator for 10+ years and have worked with a variety of RAID server configurations, database management suites, and enterprise backup software packages.

http://blog.ub.com/2010/11/hand-histories/

1. The relevant hand histories originated from the Excapsa Software package (it handles all the real-time data analysis in memory as hands are being played live.)

2. After hands are played, the data is sent to a database to be permanently stored on a hard drive.

Q: Was the database storage solution created by and part of the Excapsa Software package, or was it a publicly available database management software package such as Oracle or SQL?

3. The database was stored on a server with RAID configured hard drives.

Q: What type of RAID configuration was used on the server (assuming it was not RAID 0 as this is not really making use of the RAID method and there would be no purpose in labeling it RAID)?

4. One of the RAID drives failed.

Q: Was the array rebuilt by replacing the failed drive with an identical functioning drive? If so, what errors were encountered in trying to rebuild the array? Was the RAID controller and/or the RAID configuration damaged? If the controller was not damaged then the configuration would still be healthy and the data can be recovered (in most cases automatically) by replacing the failed hard drive with an identical functioning drive. This is the purpose of using RAID.

Q: Was the damaged disk sent to a data recovery specialist? Was the damaged disk destroyed or reused? Is UB willing to publicly submit the failed hard drive for testing to a respected data recovery company? Data recovery specialists can re-create the data on a hardware level by reading the individual magnetized sectors on a physically damaged disk and can even emulate RAID array configurations to re-create the data.

5. Backups were “lacking.”

Q: Were backups made of the database in question at any point in time? Were there any backups of the RAID configuration? It is unclear from the post whether backups were never made or were lost. At face value, this seems to be an absurdity caused by negligible incompetence, at best.

I have been involved in data loss situations where the RAID controller malfunctioned or its configuration was accidentally erased and we didn’t have a backup of either the RAID configuration or the data, but NEVER from one hard drive failing in a RAID array.

Either the array can be rebuilt, which is usually the first option available in the RAID controller's software interface in the event of a drive failure, or the drive's data can be physically extracted and rebuilt by data recovery specialists.

I would also like to comment briefly on the issue another poster alluded to with (part of the?) cheating program being eventually discovered as a localized set of registry entries on the cheater's machine. If this is all that was required to see another person's hole cards, and the program was eventually hijacked and distributed by person's not in the original conspiracy, how can we know that the cheating was ever limited in scope to a certain number of specific accounts that did not understand how to be cheat discretely in poker terms? Did the server only broadcast hold cards to specific accounts that were able to receive the info through the registry entries, or could anyone with any account be a superuser if they had the registry entries? Is this something that UB has or will investigate (do you care?)

Thanks for taking the time...

This is almost certainly true. From what I recall of when you signed with UB you specifically said that you were going to search for the culprits behind the scandal. That was a mistake -- there's no way a site pro such as yourself who came in a long time after the incident is going to make huge progress on the case. I don't doubt you've done what you can though.

Also, I don't think you should say anymore about Jon, his gf, or that situation. You've said enough already. If you want to out his gf for whatever her skeletons are, do it. If not, don't mention it anymore.

It's pretty absurd that ub thinks is a valid excuse.

FYI, I created the 2nd thread, not Joe.

oh
just wondering ...sorry kev
I like it actually I got lost on page 11 of the last..I lagged

I mentioned this in the previous thread but it probably got buried amidst all of the other nonsense. 12 or 18 months after news of the scandal broke, UB confiscated all unearned bonuses from its users even though when those bonuses were given they were given under the premise "the bonus will never expire." In my case, I had around $2500 of uncleared bonuses when I stopped playing there because of the scandal that I probably would have been able to clear in 2 or 3 months but I obviously no longer trusted the site. I logged into my account after getting some survey from UB about "why I didn't play there anymore" and then getting invited back with some "the cheating scandal is behind us" BS and saw that all of my uncleared bonuses had been confiscated.

Stealing more money from people after you already stole from them is just about the stupidest thing a company could do if its trying to improve its reputation. I might have considered playing at UB again (at lower limits) if the new owners made an honest attempt at redeeming the UB name but after stealing uncleared bonuses there's no way in hell I'd ever play there again.

you kinda got sidetracked here,i think you need to finish what you originally intended to say unless your original intention was to sidetrack,in that case you can just leave it at however.

props to you for coming on here

Some of your questions are addressed in the Poker Road forums by someone who spoke to a former UB IT worker.

http://www.pokerroad.com/forums/open...bets-dept.html

update on actually getting paul here? since he's so easy to talk to and answers all of your questions truthfully and is apparently an understanding guy, i dont see why you didnt address the only possible thing you could possibly be useful for.

let me know when thread #3 is up with some actual content

That was me and he is a current UB IT worker who was there during the time in question.

I am still in the process of following up with the director of IT at the time as well as the DB / Backup consultant that built helped to build their systems.

I was about to hit post in the other thread when it got locked. Talk about timing.

The only thing worse than making a mistake is not admitting it. I give you credit. You were warned coming here was a pre-determined epic fail. You trusted Shane and came anyway. You handeld yourself with respect in the face of the predictable landlside against you.

It's a mistake for you to talk so much about the company's history and affairs when you're nothing more than an after the fact sponsored pro. I get you're a face/rep of the brand. But information wise running the company I'd be surprised if you had so much info/input as the owner/operators.

That's not what they pay you for. You should understand that and not address what you don't have access too. Sponsorship is understandably big for you and if you believe it's an honest and fair shuffle and that player's money is safe, that's all you need to say.

I get the guilt by association etc and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out they're still crooked. That has nothing to do with the info you're given to make your decision and the choices you make based on that.

You're gambling on the brand the same way Alex did when he left Doyle for Victory. Way different circumstances. Same career gamble. Putting your name on a brand and hope it's a good decision. Time will tell. Don't let yourself sink with the ship. You're not the Captain. You're the flag holder.

I think you were respectful and honest here and that's all you can do as a man. I have no idea how you carry yourself in other affairs, but here you did a good job. Learn what you can from it. GL.

Sebok's biggest crime has been to underestimate this whole issue. If he hadn't allowed this image of some sort of caped crusader wading in to save the day he would be coping far less abuse. Let's face it, there's ex-UB pro's and current UB pro's, many of whom were/are far bigger names who have somehow managed to escape under the radar so its not as if people were out to get Joe - he gave them a reason.

That said, the unrelenting insults, innuendo and abuse that he receives is over the top. There's no need for it. He's obviously a genuine guy who has get in way above his head and as a result struggles to satisfy the bloodthirsty nature of many of you.

Joe, one question, if, in say a years time, you are still unable to get to the bottom of this, would you gracefully step down from UB as not only has the company failed you, but you've failed the very people you said you'd help?

wow what an absolutely worthless post

Joe,

Even though I couldnt disagree more with your position on the UB scandal or the morality of you (or any other person) repping UB I appreciate the fact that you are willing to come into the forums and give your thoughts.

Having said that I dont think there is anything you can accomplish by posting here. You are trying to promote a company that has stolen millions of dollars from the very commmunity you are part of. The only thing you can do to please the poker community at this point would be to leave UB and try to rebuild your rep in the poker world but the financial deal you are currently recieving is obviously too great to give up at this point.

I hope you're considering the future. You are a young man and the UB sponsorship will someday come to an end. Then what?

I would also like to know how/if this has impacted pokerroad.

Kevmath,
Since the main confusion in the old thread was the discussion of two unrelated topics, maybe it would be best if you left the parts about Fatal Error in the old thread?

There is no question in my mind that this guy is regretting ever signed with UB.