#620 – HONESTY & SIXTY MINUTES – Part I – Full Tilt and Me

For a long time, I have known – as have many people involved in online poker – about the cheating reported by SIXTY MINUTES that took place at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker.  To anybody who reads 2+2 or Pocket Fives or other forums, this was not brand new information.  Nevertheless, I have never written about these matters.

I am in an awkward position.  Just about anything I write could be open to a charge of self-interest and, worse, could open Full Tilt to charges they neither brought on and I’m not equipped to answer.  For instance, if I had given my opinions about these cheating situations while they were going on and criticized those sites, I would be looked at simply as a shill for my site.  And it would be inevitable that someone would say, “If you are going to complain about those other sites, what’s to say Full Tilt doesn’t have some of the same things going on.  Can you prove that Full Tilt doesn’t have server accounts?  What about the pros affiliated with Full Tilt who play on the site?  How can you prove Chris Ferguson didn’t go from zero to $10,000 by simply knowing his opponents’ hole cards?”

On the other hand, if I tried to give some perspective by stating that these were isolated instances, or they involved rogue employees, or they have been addressed, or they can’t happen at Full Tilt, I can be easily dismissed as a pimp for Full Tilt and online poker.  This would also lead to the same questions to me personally to prove that these things couldn’t or aren’t happening at Full Tilt.

But now that SIXTY MINUTES has run its story, I think I have to say something. I mean, if The Full Tilt Poker Blog ignored the story, someone might say I must have something to hide. I don’t, and as far as I know neither does Full Tilt.  I want to add two things to the discussion: (1) In my limited, anecdotal view – about which I am nonetheless very confident – Full Tilt runs an honest shop. (2) Although opponents of online gambling are probably going to seize the story as an example of why it should be outlawed, the situation really cries out for legalization and regulation. In fact, the case for legalizing and regulating online gambling is probably stronger than the case for similar treatment of live casinos.
FULL TILT AND ME

Let me start by saying that, though I am employed by Full Tilt Poker, I have very little interaction or knowledge concerning its operations, and they provide very little in the way of direction or oversight on the blog.  In fact, the only time anybody at Full Tilt recommended that I not write something was when a third-party contractor to Full Tilt complained when I criticized something about another third-party contractor to Full Tilt.  Even then, all that happened was that the person registered their complaint.  Nothing was changed in the blog by me or Full Tilt, and nobody at Full Tilt ever said anything about it to me again.

It’s my conclusion based on being an intelligent person, a good judge of character, and someone who is simultaneously trusting and skeptical, that Full Tilt poker is operated by an honest group of smart, careful businesspeople, who believe the best way to enrich themselves is by providing an excellent and scrupulously honest online poker site.  I have two main reasons for believing this.

First, I am friendly with several of Full Tilt’s founders, operators, spokespeople, tech people, and marketing people.  I have acquired this knowledge over the last 4 1/2 years of writing about some of these people as an outside journalist, a collaborator, and colleague.  I know a lot of these people are professional gamblers.  And I know gambling historically has that anything-goes mentality.  And I know at just about everything regarding Full Tilt’s operations is cloaked in some level of mystery.  (More about that later.)

But without exception, everybody I have dealt over the past 4 1/2 years who is been connected with Full Tilt has struck me as fundamentally honest and focused on operating an honest business.  I’ll give two examples.  The first example occurred early during the period when I was working on the Strategy Guide.  During the early part of 2006, it was clear to me that Full Tilt had very specific and very advanced plans about becoming a public company.  I could tell it was their preference to go public in the United States but that was clearly impossible because of the uncertain legal status of online poker.  Whatever little I learned about their plans to go public in Europe – those plans came to an end with the passage of the UIGEA in October 2006 – were accompanied by an attitude of full disclosure.  Specifically, people at Full Tilt thought that other online gaming companies that had gone public were two tricky and not sufficiently transparent.  Full tilt’s goal was to become a huge, rich, successful company, and they thought the best way to go public was to hire the best auditing and underwriting firms available and build an operation that could withstand the scrutiny to bring in billions of investor dollars.  So it wasn’t simply that they wanted to get rich or they wanted to go public; everything I saw told me that their specific route was based on being honest and disclosing.

My second example of how these people strike me as honest is simply the existence of Chris Ferguson.  Chris was in on the idea to start a pro-promoted online poker site from Full Tilt’s beginning, the idea being hatched while he played online poker on other sites following his 2000 world championship.  In the four years between concept and going live, Ferguson had numerous opportunities to become affiliated with the other leading online poker sites.

I can’t make it any more plain than to say there’s no way to reconcile Chris Ferguson being involved (much less to be the architect) of something not honest.  Chris is a very unusual person and, clearly, he has his flaws.  Most of them, he makes no attempt to hide and readily admits.  But he is scrupulously honest.  And even if he was not one of the most honest people I have ever met, his attitude toward the money is completely the opposite of anyone who would consider cheating.

Ferguson does not let money play a role in important decisions.  He’s cheap, he’s careful with money, he doesn’t want to be taken advantage of in financial situations – but he won’t let money dictate his behavior. After he won the World Championship, he spent more than six months looking for a car, and finally picked out an Acura sedan. He’s still driving that car eight years later. Until just two years ago, he still lived in his parents’ basement. I don’t think he owns any jewelry (excluding, of course, five bracelets) or any property.

Chris has an extremely strong moral compass but even if he had a weak one, he just doesn’t consider money important enough to compromise himself.

My second reason for considering Full Tilt a fundamentally honest operation is that they don’t have “server accounts” or whatever they’re called that allows the site operator to see all the cards in real time. How do I know this? They told me. How do I know they weren’t lying or concealing anything?

Of course, I asked them about it when I first learned about the Absolute and Ultimate Bet cheating. And if they secretly had such accounts, they probably wouldn’t tell me, right? But I asked some different people at a different time under different circumstances – in a situation in which someone could have “slipped” and told me if such accounts existed.

In 2007, I was asked to submit a proposal for an educational product for Full Tilt to offer. (Someone else ultimately is running that operation and the product, which is awesome, will be available soon.) In preparing my proposal, I spoke with some tech people at Full Tilt – not the operators or the big bosses – about an idea I had to webcast some tournament final tables on Full Tilt. My plan was for me and a top Full Tilt pro to watch some final tables, seeing the hole cards in real time, and providing contemporaneous audio and/or video and/or written commentary. I asked about trying it as an experiment, with the goal of it becoming a regular “program” on Full Tilt and possibly the source of some educational content.

They told me that Full Tilt’s software didn’t have that capability. I was told that information could be obtained immediately after the hand, but not as the hand was being played. All Full Tilt would have is hand-history-style information, and that wasn’t available until the completion of each hand. They explained to me the technology that sent this information from a random number generator to players’ computers, but they had to dumb it down a lot for me to understand even the basics. (For instance, they explained to me how, with the type of programming Full Tilt used, it was actually MORE work to make hole-card data available to the site administrator.)

I thought I was offering them an opportunity to take poker commentary and instruction to the next level by reporting online tournaments, live, in their (final table) entirety, with hole cards just like ESPN and the WPT do. I was excited about the idea but they dismissed it out of hand. In Full Tilt’s programming, that kind of information wasn’t available in real time.

I can offer only my own opinion, but it made sense to me.

I don’t expect that everyone will uncritically believe that my opinions are honest or honestly motivated. But consider my perspective. I was a writer before I was a poker writer or a poker player (and a lawyer before that). I’m well paid by Full Tilt but not pinned down by the opportunity working for the site provides. I’ve been approached by other sites as well as knowing that other sites and publications having nothing to do with poker would be interested in employing me. There are numerous book projects I’ve put off while involved in poker.

So I don’t NEED this job if it means participating in some scam or cover up. And even if you don’t trust THAT, look at one last item: if I was privy to some kind of dishonesty at Full Tilt, I could cash in on a book that would be bigger than anything Full Tilt could pay me to keep writing the blog. Even if I was an opportunitistc untrustworthy sleazebag, it would be in my interest to rat them out if I had the goods.

Stay tuned for Part II – How to Encourage Honesty in Online Poker. Coming soon.

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