Roosting Next Door

So now, Hoyazo is alleging Waffles dumped chips to Mookie during the New Years' Eve Mookie tournament (right after Waffles busted Hoy from the tourney), presumably in order to win some type of small prop bet.

The same Hoyazo who champions rampant cheat site Ultimate Fraud Bet as thee place to play online poker these days.

I wasn't there; I didn't play the Mookie. That said, Waffles has a long, well-documented history of playing shit cards in shit spots. He'll be the first or second to admit that. Hell, Hoy takes great pride in winning with the Hammer. So on that basis alone, he doesn't really have much of a basis to complain about someone playing 95o. (Of course, shoving with the Hammer, versus calling a shove with 95soooted are two far different plays). We all know Waffles is perfectly capable of calling off all his chips with crap cards under any circumstance -- possibly having prop bets has no more impact on that call than being drunk.

But the whole point of this post is simply this -- people who choose to play at Ultimate Bet don't really get to complain about the appearance of impropriety in the games they play on any site, because they've already decided that game integrity isn't very high on their priority list. This isn't an anti-Hoyazo rant by any stretch. However, getting righteously indignant because you think you've been had doesn't really hold a lot of water when you willingly spend so much time on a site known to have cheated their player base for so long, and a site that still has not been nearly transparent enough in their response to their own shenanigans. Not to mention a site that appears to continue to inappropriately give players' money to insiders whether by negligence or malfeasance taking place on their servers without adequate explanation.

Hoy is perfectly entitled to go on monkey tilt, however. So on that note, I'm hoping to find a Waffles-worthy rant on the Hammer Player blog, soon.

When Levity Is Called For

Okay, in an attempt to see what the fuss is really about, I downloaded* the new and improved Ultimate Bet software:



Which one should I pick?










*and by "downloaded", I of course refer to saving a pic found on 2+2 on my system.

Does Your Compass Point to "D"?

"D" for disappointment, that is?

This post started as a comment on Hoy's latest blog entry, but I felt it bears reposting and expounding upon here.

For the unfamiliar, two of the strongest poker-playing bloggers I know have recently scored a ton of MTT success over at Ultimate Bet Fraud. Without question, Chad and Hoy are two of the most dangerous agressive MTT players out there. Both are clearly talented players, and both have pulled down quite a few significant and well-deserved scores over time. Yet, I'm disappointed in them both. (And yes, I'm fully aware that my disappointment shouldn't, or at least doesn't, matter two shits to either of them.)

Why?

Because it's come from playing a site on which founding ownership openly cheated players out of at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. A site that, although since sold, the new ownership (which is actually not much different at all from the previous ownership, by accounts) has simply papered over the scandal by paying restitution to accounts known to have been cheated, but not outing those actually responsible and only describing their response in the vaguest of terms.

Yes, they're on a new network, Cereus. So let's see who else is on that network. That's right, the other known cheating site, Absolute Bet Fraud, owned by the very same people. I won't even accept blog advertising from them, and have turned it down in the past.

Look, we all know that poker is already perceived as a shady proposition (and in some instances, it actually is).

Cereus ownership would like us to simply take them at their word that their site is safe and honest. Let's take a quick look at that, shall we?

Just this past weekend, in a 200/400 Limit HE game, Bet Fraud awarded a pot to the losing hand. This pot was over $4,000 in cash. Not chips, but hard dollars. And just who was the "losing" player in the hand, who had the 2nd best hand at showdown but who raked the pot? None other than Phil Hellmuth, chief spokesperson for Ultimate Bet. In their press release, UB again only vaguely refers to some misawarded pot, without acknowledging that the beneficiary was one of their most insider of insiders.

Here's the thing -- in my eyes, anyone who plays on that site now would seem to have to exercise some real moral equivalency in order to do so. Like, it's not that big a deal that UB cheated players -- after all, as long they haven't cheated you or someone you know, they can't be that bad, right? Something like that. And that if someone displays the moral equivalency in that regard, then their moral compass may be as equivalent in other areas.

Like, it may be okay to lie to the UN Security Council to justify an invasion of a dictator you don't like, because while you don't have kids in the armed forces, the ends justify the means, but it's not okay for your employer to lie to you about the corporate health of your employer, because YOUR 401k is at stake, so their ends don't justify the means. Just a hypothetical...

I think that kind of shifting moral compass is just wrong. And I'm sad that Hoy and Chad appear to value winning money over having a certain amount of principle. It's almost as if they saw that the scandals chased out a lot of the strong players, leaving behind only the fishiest of fish, and they've seen it as a golden opportunity for their advanced poker skills to take advantage of the weak.

My problem with this isn't with the latter part of this equation -- that's just poker. If you suck at poker, you're going to lose your money to someone better, as you should. It's with the former part -- joining a site with a long (and possibly still ongoing) history of cheating players, because the aftereffects of the ongoing scandals have shaped conditions on the ground in your favor (e.g., most of the other strong players have left, giving you a greater edge on the field).

The idea of essentially benefitting from someone else's cheating to put yourself in a better position just ain't cricket, in my book.

Now, I'm pretty certain those guys don't see things the same way. That's certainly their right, and reasonable minds can differ. I'm not even trying in the least to persuade them to leave those sites. Hell, if everyone felt like I felt, there wouldn't be any players on those two sites at all, so clearly, there are differing opinions.

But if you're okay playing on a site known to cheat, then you may be equally okay with playing in a tournament while girly chatting with someone else at your table during the tournament? Then you might just be okay with "just this once" IMing about a hand while its in progress? It's a slippery slope, is all I'm saying.