Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves
The talented Haley Hintz has grabbed hold of UB's hair shirt and continues the cheating saga. She is doing the grunt work on a messy reporting of what transpired. Frankly, it is making me ill but not for the reason you might suspect.
Haley's blog is a difficult read. The dataset provided has holes and that's her problem. It is a reasonable problem. What isn't said is that stand-alone hand histories are incomplete outlines masquerading as complete information. That is, they aren't complete without context. Context is damaged by the corruption of the sample.
Now I'm not very happy with all this either. But, it has nothing to do with what has transpired. It has everything to do with what hasn't transpired. That is an audit by people with the ability to act fully on the analysis.
The missing ingredient is protection. Not in the sense we rehash above. That happened. What didn't happen was prosecution. Based on the attitude of various governments, cheating on such sites was possible and remains possible without the possibility of appropriate safeguards in our system of current laws. Nobody has real jurisdiction. So, tomorrow your favorite site could go silly or negligent and have the same thing happen.
And when – not if – that happens, the person is very likely to walk like they walked at UB and Absolute. That is, of course, for those who are U.S. facing sites. Those licensed and traded in England are subject to scrutiny by their assumed independent auditors working on behalf of public share holders. Additionally, their actions are subject to the courts in both criminal and tort actions. There is no jurisdictional question.
I guess it is fun to hash and rehash the fiasco that we saw play out. But the real question is bypassed by the exercise.
Related posts:
Your comments are dead-on. I’m aware of the flaws in my methodology, but one has to start somewhere. One thing that I’m now sure of is that the HH’s (flawed as they are), were extracted based on two different protocols. I’ll be issuing a public call in that 2+2 thread for anyone who has received HH’s against the cheating accounts to send them to me. And here’s why:
Some of the HH’s are complete runs of hands, while others are broken up into little bits and pieces, with lots of hands missing. So far the complete-run sessions show a very random distribution of hands, but I want to examine the chopped-up sessions and determine if their overall composition (in terms of the cheaters’ hole-card holdings) differs significantly from random distribution. There are things one can learn from these omissions, even if we don’t necessarily have each and every hand played.
It’s a process that’s going to take me many weeks, if not months.
By the way, I disagree with your “likely to walk” comment. Authorities move slowly but I’d guess that a goldmine north of $20 million will be too juicy for them to not put some effort into continuing to pursue. I expect in another year or two a RICO case or something similar will be filed. US feds always like to time them against big gambling events, too, for the notoriety, so I’d make a random guess that we might see something break two weeks before the Super Bowl in 2011 or 2012.
I see your point with RICO or some omnibus type of law. The point really is that there isn’t a mechanism in place to properly do discovery or find a court that would address the problem without a convoluted use of the courts. It has to make class action attorneys sad.