I watched it this morning over coffee. Thanks for making it.

Wow, you have the actual refund list? I never knew this. I saw a list shown during the movie, but I assumed it was just some document showing what certain players lost, and not a full list of actual refunds sent.

I'm not asking you to post this list (as it would violate some players' privacy), but I have a few questions:

1) How much did it add up to? Was it really $22 million?

2) Was this a list of refunds actually claimed, or just those that were placed in accounts? As you know, if it was just the latter, the unclaimed money would have gone right back to UB after 6 months of not being claimed.

3) Do you believe the document to be correct and real? Is it possible that phony screen names were added there, and then subsequently "leaked", in order to give the impression that more was paid out than in reality?

The list is genuine and adds up to what the site reported but there are several caveats as explained in the film. Some is the 6 month thing and we don't know how much of that occurred. Some is the withheld due to deeb connections and that is significant (maybe as high as $2-4m). Some of it went to people we cannot figure out.

There is a screen in the film describing the 1st refund round with three spanish brothers receiving close to a million dollars. Though we can find the screennames, the actual guys are not high stakes players and using an interpreter we called one of them. He said he got back $3,000 not $300,000 and doesn't understand why he is listed for such a large amount. I have tried hard to figure out if these were accounts for some well-known high stakes player without success.

Also, I will have an announcement later today likely about the timelines, etc. I truly appreciate everyone's feedback/advice/thoughts on our "soft launch".

just bought it now and looking forward to it. am downloading it and it says it is going to be 17 hours to download (~75KB/s). Anyone else have this issue, seems to be coming down very slowly from Vimeo.

thanks

Its one of the things we are looking into. Currently the option is to download the 1080p full movie and Vimeo's compression conversion added a little heft to what was originally a 3gb file so that it is now closer to 4gb. Hopefully we will be able to offer different resolutions and sizes for download. If you click watch, they automatically scale to whatever device you are using and you don't have the same issue.

alright, thanks!

(tell them to get faster servers )

Really want to see it.
But can not buy on it Vimeo with neteller
Are there any other options where i can buy it ?

ElevenGrover

As you might know I have followed you and this story from Day 1. I have always enjoyed your information, thoughts, and analysis of this story.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film and thought it to be excellent.

I have some ideas that might make it a bit more interesting and if I can find the time I will post my thoughts. I will say this. While the corporate information regarding structure, reorganizations etc... may be of some merit in dealing with this from a legal standpoint and plays a role in outlining the "players", I think it is much too convoluted for most viewers. While it recognizes your amazing research, the depth of it may leave viewers unfulfilled and confused. I would consider simplifying the corporate stuff.

But it was extremely interesting and well done and I will watch it again.

Scott,

Thank you so much for all your work in this film. Everybody really appreciates your contribution.

I have a few questions after viewing.

1) The Annie Duke delayed viewing tool thingy seems very unclear to me. Are you able to expand any further on what this might have been used for? Also were her PR lies on that radio show on purpose on her behalf, or do you believe she was told to say things without realizing they were not true?

2) When the film referred to the real name behind one of the many cheating accounts, but didn't really expand beyond that, are we meant to believe that the owners of the accounts used the cheating tool themselves? Or were the accounts passed off to Russ and/or someone else to be used for cheating?

3) Did I understand correctly that Travis Makar was going to be the sole scapegoat of the scandal, until Nat discovered the Russ Hamilton connection? Seems like it would have been a really tough sell.

4) Any idea what Russ is up to these days? I wonder if he doing poorly lately if he would ever consider speaking out against some of the other cheaters who have gotten away unscathed.

Is there any way someone could compile a list of all the persons involved in the cheating scandal, with a breakdown of what exactly we know for sure about them, and what is suspected? Also possibly a chart of some sort connecting all the different companies and entities involved. I think including that as a file to view along side the film would help a great deal with following all the action. The film is obviously VERY information dense and is hard to follow at times. There are just so many different characters, dates, and companies to keep track of.

Yeah, thats a tough one. The corporate stuff is to mainly show motivation across the board. The IPOs, the lottery mentality, the inexperience, the legal situation. All of it combines to create circumstance that allows internal corruption. I think its pretty important. What I have done is change the timeline around to bring all the cheating accounts together and all the corporate history in one long arc. I think it is going to work. In the process I have done some simplifying though, so I do agree to a point. The new cut will also have two graphic timelines; a master timeline to show where we are in years for key points and a 2008 timeline to show critical events during the investigations.

With Annie, the Reitman tourney is a mystery. I spoke at length with Joe and he seems like an honest enough dude, but he is an actor ;-) The circumstance and handling of the tourney just raised way too many questions that UB typically slagged off and Annie sent a Burston Marstellar flack to tell me she wasn't going to answer them now. But, it is also to show that tourneys could have been a way for insiders to randomly pick up nice paydays and never get caught even if the circumstances look super fishy. And since they didn't even refund the Aruba sat that they knew was corrupted, they weren't going to refund or even find one offs won by insiders.

I think people like Curtis, Novinskey, Digioia clearly did not cheat with Russ separating the moneyflows from the people willing to go to prison. The people who look real suspicious (and Makar could just tell us) are Russ' longtime gambling friends; Bonnie, Woody, Fred, a few others. But without subpoenas, it is hard to see how we will ever know.

Travis was set to fall when they thought they could sell $5m as the number. The 1st identified accounts behind the 1st screennames were only 4 people, Lauren and Travis, Saccavino and Bajayo. If that had been all they got, selling Travis would have been quite easy. But Fosco's withheld names added Russ' girlfriend, Travis mom Becky, Houston Curtis and several fakes while increasing the time in action. Once that happened, selling Travis was off the table and Pierson was already working the fallback position.

I think he's driving a 2007 Caddy and commuting to central America to earn. I believe he is likely not doing as well as he once did though whether he is truly broke is an open question. But he blew through a big pile of money along the way so it isn't all on Greg.

When things ease up, I plan to build a partner website for the film to house all the documents.

Heh, wow, pretty impressive how vehemently wrong Ike was in that thread. Reading his comments felt a little like watching Dick Stockton and Brian Billick narrating the last few minutes of today's Cowboys-Lions game.

Thanks to everybody who put this together. I haven't played a hand of poker in years, but I still really appreciated this.

EG, you've heard from me separately from this thread, but this^^^ is a great suggestion, so much so that I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it.

I assume you mean Pierson, not Nielsen.

Scott mentioned in his 2+2 PokerCast interview that this entire project was originally intended to be a book, not a film, and that it probably is still better suited to be a book. This is one of those examples -- in a book, it's easy to provide an appendix that lists all of the major players, who they are, and what their role is/was. If UltimateBeat had been a book, we would be able to reference a similar appendix throughout.

Anyway, another good suggestion although probably tougher to execute. The cast of characters is far more multidimensional than a timeline. I think I might have been the person who suggested adding photos to the transferees because I wanted to be able to match a face with a name (or SN) whenever it was mentioned.

By the way, I'm glad you gave it a second look, and I urge others to do the same. The first time I saw this film, I admit I felt pretty overwhelmed by the sheer amount of info contained in it and the long roster of characters to keep track of. Tuesday's release marked the fourth time I had seen it (although the first time in its current edit). I can honestly say it has gotten more enjoyable to watch each time because the names and faces become more familiar.

EG said in the interview something I wanted to say in this thread: UltimateBeat is more of a document than a documentary. It presents a case more than it tells a story. It makes for a challenging watch, particularly the first time through, but on balance I'm glad EG took the route he did. Had he made a glossy overview (what the The Smartest Guys In The Room film was to the book), I probably would have felt cheated, so to speak. Plus, it would not have done justice to the tremendous amount of research Scott and his team have completed.

Finally, has Haley Hintze seen it? Curious to know what she thinks, one way or another.

^^^

It's a little twisty, but they take the company private in 2006 with Excapsa shareholders getting $50m in cash on hand (mostly from IPO). Over the next three years, the site makes some payments on the promissory note such that there is still money left to disburse in 2012. Hellmuth told at least one person they were getting money back. We now know that refunds did not cover the entirety of cheating with several clear events never reconciled and some unknown amount of cheating not outed. Excapsa as the last owner of record definitely had liability for the entire fraud repayment, even to the detriment of common shareholders completely innocent.

The problem of course is the money in question would go to pay back defrauded players, not current depositors but its all academic since none are getting paid anything. It just goes to that point that insiders banked checks after successfully denying players full refunds.

Do you know how much hellmuth made from excapsa shares after the scandal? Were payments made after Black Friday?

No / Yes

We have an idea of payouts based on the anonymous trusts. His unwillingness to answer questions about ownership make it impossible to know exact figures. Distributions were made on 2/22/12 and 6/15/12 with the larger trusts receiving ~$280k.

Thank you EG & Team behind this film. I purchased and watched it yesterday. Fantastic job!

just finished watching, great job !

Appreciate the documentary and all the hard work you put into it.

So just to be clear and sum major events (as i understand it) ...

- Cheating originated with creation of Potripper/God Mode software which cheated players for Millions (created and used by owners/insiders/select players).
- Poker players on 2+2 investigate UB winning players and discover extreme anomalies / outliers.
- UB performs their own investigation from a third party, admits/realizes cheating has occurred, reimburses select players (although disbursements/details are never made public).
- UB then claims software is clean and safe, but God Mode software is never uninstalled/removed, and cheating continues until shut down on Black Friday.
- Currently no one has been accused or arrested, 50 million in player liabilities are missing or from my understanding stolen. The owners never released statements about what happened (besides a Helmuth cop out)?
- Many UB creators currently have new jobs in gaming.
- There is nothing cheated players can do at the moment besides send tweets to senators asking for assistance. Or is there? I would add this in the doc.
- Players are left waiting for distributions from assets valued at 5 million dollars. But given the recent trend of the DOJ payment process, this may (and probably will) never happen.

Close, the Director's Cut should clean up some of the misunderstanding above.

UB performs their own investigation without any third party, all parties are conflicted insiders.

God mode is uninstalled in 2008 and as far as we can tell it was not used after. Financially, the scandal crushed the site, which was already taking on water due to setting up a processor infrastructure, processor seizures, expensive development shops and a large iovation contract. If the 500k per month number for iovation is correct, that company extracted 6m per year between 2006 and 2009 alone.

Nobody has been arrested (unless you count Russ' DUI when he almost ran into the guard tower leading into his neighborhood and Travis going all Starsky/Hutch on a bunch of UT JDs).

UB creators have periphery jobs that could become core U.S. legalized management gigs.

Tweeting senators is like singing to your dog (momentarily pleasing, but ultimately insipid)

Players are waiting for godot

Just watched and thought it was good but thought theres no way any average viewer will be able to really understand what they're watching.

I don't remember this figure being include in the film. If indeed this contract was bloated for the simple reason of sucking AP/UB dry and injecting the funds into Iovation, then this should be in the film. Perhaps you could compare this 500k/month figure to some of Iovations other paying customers at the time of similar size. If I remember correctly, I think companies of similar size were paying roughly 2% of this amount. This seems very important.

Amazing work, EG. You should be proud. At the risk of turning this into an AMA, here's some scattershot questions for you:

- Have Hellmuth and Pierson continued their relationship (either personal or professional) since the Russ tapes came out? Didn't Phil's statement make vague allusions to having a bad read on Pierson, but not actually calling him out? Kind of unconscionable, and just wondering whether they've continued to cavort since then.

- Did you get threatened with a lawsuit or the like during your research, or since releasing the film?

- Do you think anyone whose rep was initially getting torn to shreds for association with this whole thing actually got a BAD / undeserved rap?

- Any idea how much Hellmuth & Duke were getting paid to endorse the site? (beyond their presumed equity ownership...)

- Did you ever talk to law enforcement, and/or have any enforcement parties ever seemed to want to look further into this? I can't think of any other situation where you have a crook admitting on tape to stealing tens of millions of dollars, and is walking around scott free.

- Did you ever learn anything new about the pot where Hellmuth lost at showdown, but pot was shipped to him? The odds of that happening in a huge game in a hand involving one of the site's stakeholders is...just wow. The odds of that truly having just been a software glitch that could have happened to ANY player seem infinitesimal.

Thanks EG for the response, more questions:

1. After 2008, the God Mode software was no longer in place (although i thought the documentary stated it was never uninstalled??). So the majority of the cheating and stealing came from... "processor infrastructure, processor seizures, expensive development shops and a large iovation contract."? Personally, this is probably the most confusing part.

2. Of the 5 million on hand vs the 55 million of player liabilities, are the numbers the a result of the ENTIRE scam (from the beginning)? Or do these numbers specifically pertain to 2008 - onward?

3. Most obvious question - Based on facts, seems everyone knows the creators cheated and broke the law. Why hasn't something been done? Does it come down to basically they cheated, but there is nothing we can do about it based on proof? Just tons of circumstantial evidence? Just seems the data trail has to exist somewhere, perhaps thats the million dollar question.

4. Do you have any recommendations on what players can do? Or at this point is it simply a lost cause?

5. Godot reference = well played.

Please forgive me if many of these numbers were already covered.. I missed a bit of the film due to several instances of dry heaving ie. When Ace Ventura finds out Finkle is Einhorn.

Good work, really enjoyed the doc and +1 to the suggestion that this should be sent to shareholders/potential business partners of iovation if at all possible.

To my recollection (frustratingly I can't find anything now through google) it was more a case of how Duke was doing a live commentary on the final table and effectively coaching Reitman, for example by saying things like "I would call with AQ or better here" when he dwelled up facing an all in. That's as I recall it, FWIW. There was also something dodgy about a tournament in Aruba? That Negreanu called them out on? This was all so long ago.

Also curious as to whether you contacted any of the pros who worked for UB only to leave as soon as they possibly could, Bax and Rizen spring to mind.