Online card games cheat exposed

Has to know when to hold 'em

The Inquirer By Nick Farrell: Thursday, 18 October 2007, 8:34 AM

PLAYERS of the online Absolute Poker game have found that someone in the company was involved in a cheating operation.

According to the New York Times, punters playing the game got a bit suspicious when one of the players seemed to know what cards were in their hands.

Normally at this point there would be lots of close ups of people's faces, chewing of cigars until someone spat and the cheater would be shot dead. Unfortunately since such action was impossible online, one of the players who’d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament.

Absolute Poker accidentally sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never normally release. The file contained every player’s cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing.

The Times thinks that someone in Absolute Poker knew that the cheating was taking place and sent too much information to the players so that they could take appropriate action.

Each game was monitored by an 'observer' who is a guest who can’t see any of the players’ cards. When this observer was watching the game the cheater did not lose and seemed to know when another player had the best hand.

The gamers looked at who this observer was and in each case it was Scott Tom, part-owner of Absolute Poker, who was operating from the company's servers.

In otherwords he was tipping off the cheater the cards of the other players.

Absolute Poker has denied everything.