[edmc]

Originally Posted by Jeremy

It's really hard to say what will happen in respect to the bigger affiliate sites taking AP down.

Pocket5's:

P5ers,

The past 72 hours have been really difficult for us here at P5s as things have gotten out of hand quickly in regards to the AP super-user situation. We have never faced a situation quite like this before; one of our trusted partners has been accused of serious security vulnerabilities, and the accusations appear to have merit. In fact, when this situation first came to light, our inclination was to dismiss it as another “online poker is rigged” post. However, after careful examination of all the facts presented, it’s just not possible for us to do that anymore.

Thereby, we have decided to indefinitely suspend any promotion of Absolute Poker, including site links, banners, and inclusion of future tournaments in the rankings. Please understand that this is not a conviction on our part; it's simply an acknowledgement that significant and meaningful questions have arisen about the security of their site, and until those questions can be resolved to our satisfaction, we don't feel comfortable encouraging our users to play there.

We're in the process of removing links and promotional materials--most of them are down already. Please be patient while we get this all set.

Looking ahead, we intend to work with Absolute Poker as closely as possible to get all the facts and decipher them from "Internet folk lore." In fact, we've been on several phone calls today with AP trying to find out what they know about this situation and how they’re dealing with it. We’ll continue to press them to try and find out more. They’ve also invited us to have full access to their office and systems, and we’re hoping to be able to use that access to find out more about what went wrong. Anything and everything we discover will be reported here on the site, and hopefully it will shed more light on the situation.

In closing, I'd like to say that we all want what you want---for online poker games to be safe, fair, and trustworthy. We hope that our decision helps us all in realizing that goal.

Best,

--Adam

BonusWhores:

Absolute Poker has been added to the blacklist due to the very high likelihood that cheating was, and may still be going on in high stakes cash games and tournaments, and that this was either perpetrated by someone within the AP organization, or AP has been excessively negligent in their security. In one incident, a master hand history was sent to a player who had grown suspicious about action he witnessed in a $1,000 buy-in tournament from 9/12/07. That requested hand history, presumably sent by mistake, was a master hand history (it contained the hole cards of each player.) When looking through each individual hand of this tournament, it's obvious that one of the players had knowledge of what all players were holding.

The fact that at least one player on Absolute Poker was cheating is virtually indisputable. How they were getting their information to cheat with, and who was giving it to them is a matter of speculation. However, it's obvious that Absolute Poker is not a safe place to play. If you wish to know all the details of this case, we suggest you read this thread.