60 Minutes to Air Story on Cheating Scandal
It looks like the plot is starting to thicken in the scandal involving Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker. It’s been known for a while now that 60 minutes has been preparing to air a segment about the UB/AP scandal.
I got an email back from the producers at CBS a few days ago. They declined to comment on when the story would be aired, and they basically gave me the run-around telling me to look on their website for news and updates… So I’m not sure that a date has been set for this story to air yet…but I know that they finished conducting the majority of their interviews a few months ago, so this should be shown on 60 minutes pretty soon.
If you haven’t been following this whole scandal and how things have played out, you can read about it in this recent MSNBC article www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26563848/
The independent commission that the Kahnawake Gaming Commission had assigned to deal with the scandal has finished their investigation. They named Russ Hamilton as one of the key figures involved in the cheating that occurred. Although Russ is a real person, he is somewhat of a ghost figure when it comes to the ownership of Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker. There are people who have exhausted themselves over this issue, and they still cannot find out who owns some of these companies involved with UB and AP.
To be honest, it’s actually sort of impressive to see the lengths at which the owners of these companies have gone to in order to disguise who actually owns everything. It just makes things look even shadier in my opinion.
It’s hard to speculate as to the consequences that this story will have on the internet poker world. Up until this point, the majority of people that knew about the cheating that had occurred were frequent poker players. A lot of the new and incoming players which help to fuel the online poker economy either didn’t know about this, or they just didn’t care.
Now mainstream America is about to get a glimpse of what has been going on. Unfortunately, this will be a first impression for many of them, and I don’t think it’s going to look very favorable for poker players and the online poker world. The majority of Americans have no idea that you can sit down and play for millions of dollars on the internet, so I’m expecting a lot of people to have a reaction like; “Well, what did you expect would happen?”.
I’ll be sure to post here as soon as I find out when this story is going to hit the air. Feel free to leave some comments below. Do you think this story could lead to the downfall of online poker?
Related posts:
- 60 Minutes Poker Story This Sunday
- More about Online Poker Bots and Cheating
- The Utter Failure Known as the Kahnawake Gaming Commission
- Eskimo Clark vs Russ Hamilton
- Don’t Forget Your Rakeback
Categories: 60 Minutes
