Absolutely the Worst

Unless you have been hiding under a tree lately you have heard about the recent scandal involving Absolute Poker. The condensed version is that a player named POTRIPPER won a large buy-in tournament at Absolute Poker by making essentially perfect play (the play you would make if you could see all hole cards) every hand for 126 hands in a row. This includes the most talked about hand where he called a massive all-in river bet with a ten high to beat a 9 high flush draw bluff.

Imagine a very skilled poker player who can, through observation, odds and so on, make plays that are perfect plays about 70% of the time. Over the various actions in a hand let's say that he can do an entire hand perfectly about half the time. To do 32 hands perfectly in a row for this skilled player would be about a 1 in 4 billion shot. To do 64 hands perfectly would be about a 16 QUADRILLION (16,000,000,000,000,000,000) to 1 shot. What this person did was about 250 followed by 36 0's to 1 or in short impossible. I have a far better chance of getting a foot massage from Jessica Alba, and believe me that's saying something.

To compound this issue, Absolute is not being very forthright regarding the situation and their reputation may now be permanently marred.

More information on the controversy can be found at:

Pocket Fives
Adanthar's Blog
High Stakes Report