High stakes at online poker
The online poker phenomenon is one of the surprising success stories of the Internet, but players have to put a lot of faith in the games being run fairly, and that faith has been rocked by recent scandals.
Some of the players at Canadian website Ultimate Bet had noticed that one or two of their opponents seemed to be exceptionally lucky at the game and realised that one account in particular, operating under the name NioNio, netted $300,000 in profit from just 3,000 hands of poker. They later discovered that NioNio had won 13 out of 14 high stake online tournaments and when Australian poker professional and mathematician Michael Josem compared the results to 870 other accounts with 2,500 or more recorded hands, he calculated that NioNio's win rate was less likely than winning a one-in-a-million lottery four days in a row.
The operators of Ultimate Bet, Tokwiro Enterprises, began its investigation back in January, and in May it issued a statement that there was evidence of systematic cheating and said the culprits had used "unauthorized software code that allowed the perpetrators to obtain hole card information (the cards in other players' hands) during live play."
Exactly who created this "unauthorised software" and who was using it is less certain and will probably be decided in the courts. Tokwiro Enterprises says in a statement on it website that the code must have existed before it acquired Ultimate Bet in 2006, but that would mean that the scam could have been operating for two years or more so it is going to be difficult to work out who has lost money to this scam and how they could be fairly reimbursed. MSNBC reported earlier this month that one of the companies holding a stake in Ultimate Bet has launched a claim for $75 million against Excapsa Software which formerly owned the poker software and licensed it to Ultimate Bet and other sites.
18th October 2008