There is a great story about Russ Hamilton’s win at the Main Event of the 1994 World Series of Poker. That year, first prize was for 1 million dollars plus the winner’s weight in silver. Benny Binion had decided to throw in extra equity for the tournament as it was 25 years – or the silver anniversary – of the Main Event. Now Russ, with this incentive in mind, put on a lot of weight before the series started. And I mean a lot – history has it that he put on 100 pounds (or 40 + kilograms) in the lead up to the Main Event. He is a man of vision, you must give him this – he ended up tipping the scales at a hefty 330 pounds (150 kg).
He also, rather mischievously, had filled his pockets with $2000 dollars worth of half-dollar coins to help tip the scales a little further. Oh Russ, what a card. Benny caught Russ with the offending coins in his pocket and chastised him. Everyone laughed – nothing too serious, right? Just a mildly comical angle-shoot, hey? But the half-dollar coin gambit was an insight; an insight into a character that has turned out to be perhaps the most controversial in online poker.
If you haven’t seen him, Russ looks like an obese Kenny Rogers. Just imagine Kenny after a lifetime of triple cheese burgers, Bourbon and Coke, deep fried Snickers bars and whole suckling pigs. Imagine this and then imagine the similarity with Kenny ending there. For if you’ve heard Russ speak or watched him play you’ll have figured out pretty quick he lacks the towering talent, charisma or the charm of the great Kenny R. No – he looks mainly like an obese guy with a beard.
But to give Russ credit, he certainly does know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em, and when to run. He knows these things because he’s a cheating scumbag who can see your hole cards.
You see Russ was the central figure in the Ultimate Bet / Absolute Poker cheating scandal (the same company owned both sites). Russ, in league with an unnamed[1]group of players, had a ‘super-user’ account on Ultimate Bet. Due to a security flaw at the site, passed on from previous owners to the current organisation running UB, Russ could see the hole cards of his opponents. Funnily enough, he crushed the opposition and made millions.
In his autobiography, ‘Check Raising the Devil’ Mike Matusow retells how he fell into a depression after being repeatedly beaten by Hamilton. Matusow lost 1.2 million dollars playing Russ heads-up on the Ultimate Bet site. Russ would phone him, asking for heads-up matches online: Matusow would agree, figuring (correctly) that he was a better player than Hamilton. Of course, Fat Cheating Scumbag would crush him. And so it went on, rinse and repeat.
This continued against Matusow and hundreds of other players (probably thousands) until the cheating was discovered by a bunch of math nerds on the ‘2 plus 2’ poker forum site. The nerds provided evidence that the win rate of a number of player accounts was a statistical improbability – akin to winning Lotto seven times in a row. They also recovered hand histories that only made any logical sense if one of the players involved could see his opponent’s cards.
The lid was blown off the cheating. The security flaw was fixed. The offending accounts closed down. The poker world seemed to move on. Well, not quite – I’ll get back to Fat Cheating Scumbag specifically later , but I’ve started with this controversy in order bring into focus the ethics of online poker. The Ultimate Bet / Absolute Poker scandal is about as bad as it gets. No grey areas here.
But it is the more common grey areas of online poker that are just as interesting – the unethical behaviour that is a step below super-user type cheating: multi-accounting, changing account names, data mining – the usual suspects. What should be done about these infractions? Should they even be infractions? Should we be content to let the poker sites police themselves?
Let’s first define what we are talking about, and focus on perhaps the most hard-to-police issues: multi-accounting (having a number of playing accounts on the same site) and ‘migrating’ accounts (changing from one account name to another).
Why are these things wrong? Here is a pretty good explanation:
“There are online poker players who have used 2nd screenames for the purpose of deceiving others into giving them action, evading taxes, collusion, entering multiple times into the same tournament, ghosting, to obscure previous results and stats, to clear extra bonuses, to circumvent affiliate CPA or rakeback rules, to bypass the pokersites shortstack buy-in time limitation, to teamplay, to share action with others at the same table, to chip dump or otherwise engage in underhanded actions…”
And who came up with this precise definition? Nick Grudzien, the founder of the poker training website, ‘Stoxpoker’. The same Nick Grudzien who wrote the book (literally) on high-stakes short-handed limit hold ‘em; the guy who formed a partnership between Stoxpoker and the formidable ‘Card Runners’ training site, which in turn joined up with Full Tilt Poker. Everything he did met with success – both in poker and business. He was a highly respected young turk in the online poker scene.
Until, that is, the same Nick Grudzien, was caught (and admitted to) using multiple accounts; the same Nick Grudzien who has been accused of collusion in some of the biggest cash games online (though he denies this). The Two plus Two forum published an email allegedly from PokerStars stating that Nick was banned him from the site and noting that while collusion “probably occurred”, they could prove not prove it beyond “reasonable doubt”.
So Nick had a big pile of half dollars in his pockets, trying to tip the scales in his favour. He got the edge he needed. No doubt he financially benefited from his deception. Of course, his reputation is now in tatters; he has quit Card Runners / Stox Poker and vowed to ‘take a break’ from poker (yeah, right).
Nick was outed, again, by the ‘Two plus Two’ site. To its credit, this online community has either discovered, or brought to the public’s attention, a number of poker cheats. This site and others like it have also exposed the likes of Brian Townsend (migrating accounts, sharing a database) and Justin Bonomo (entering multiple entries in the same tournament) and a number of other high profile young poker phenoms who have twisted the rules to give themselves an edge. This is all great, no doubt about that – bringing peer pressure to bear on those using underhanded tactics has helped put a stop to some of this activity.
But an uncomfortable question remains – is this enough? In the last analysis, does it pay to be unethical? For people for whom rules or reputations matter little, are there sufficient disincentives? Perhaps not, and there’s the rub. It’s depressing to say that most of the cheats that have been outed have kept some or all of their illicit winnings. They may be banned from a particular poker site, but what’s to stop them from signing up to another? Or just switching to live poker? To my knowledge, those caught cheating online usually face no consequences in live tournaments, and are able to play in any of the majors (World Series of Poker, World Poker Tour, and so on).
So the next question is, as Lenin posed, “what is to be done?” Well, as much as we’d like to we can’t put the bastards in the Gulag, but there must be ways to place pressure on cheats.
Banning them from the major online poker sites is a good start. PokerStars in particular seems to have been active in this regard on this and kudos to them. But there needs to be more; some bigger thinking on the matter. And when the average person thinks poker, usually one thing comes to mind – the granddaddy of them all – the World Series of Poker.
What if the WSOP management announced that they would start enforcing bans on known cheats? Now that would make a statement: the world’s premier poker event placing bans on players that twist or break the rules of the game. It could be for a year, or for five, or (in severe cases such as Hamilton) for life. They could make it clear that unethical behaviour is not profitable in the long term, and that it is unacceptable in the poker community.
Which brings us back to Russ Hamilton. Let’s get something straight about the Fat Cheating Scumbag. He still hasn’t been charged with any offence. Presumably he still has all the money he stole at the poker tables. Ultimate Bet is yet to name any of the other cheaters. There are also darker allegations (and I stress, only allegations) that the old management of the site, who were implicated in the cheating, still have a financial interested in the ‘new’ UB site. While the ‘new’ management of UB claims to have reimbursed all those who were cheated – and they did return over 20 million US dollars – many people who played on the site still claim that they haven’t been fully refunded. Even worse, the cheaters kept the money. They never faced court, nor were forced to pay it back
Word is Hamilton still engages in high stake golf matches around Vegas, plays poker in some of the casinos. He has committed the worst offence – the worst by far for online poker – and still he walks free. It’s a disgrace.
The WSOP could start with Russ – make the announcement before the next big one begins in 2011. I don’t think anyone, anywhere, would disagree that he should be banned, and banned for life. He is a stain on the reputation of the game and it needs to be clear that his actions are unacceptable.
And where the WSOP leads, others will follow. There isn’t any sort of uniform code or regulations across poker for this kind of thing and there probably never will, but if that great poker icon, the spiritual home of poker – the World Series – makes a stand, many of the other major tournaments will be forced to act. If the WSOP banned a player for life for cheating, how could the World Poker Tour, or the Aussie Millions, or any other major live poker tournament possibly let the same person play? How could Full Tilt or Pokerstars allow them to play on their sites?
The fact is poker, online or live, is a clean game played by people who respect the rules. Yet the sad truth is that the reputation of the whole enterprise is tarnished by the few, and the UB scandal feeds into the old stereotypes of poker being some sort of illegal backroom activity played by hustlers and crims. That’s all bullshit, of course, but when the image of the game takes a battering it makes it easier for people who oppose poker to advocate for legislation against it – for example, by trying to make the online version illegal in Australia or the US (ironically, the anti-poker lobby threatens to push online poker into a virtual illegal backroom, by keeping it outside of government regulation).
The big poker sites and the big live tournaments need to step up. The integrity of poker – which 99 per cent of poker players respect – is threatened by the Fat Cheating Scumbags of the world and these sort of people need to be kept away from the game.
This article was originally published at www.puntingace.com on August 23 2010