New Online Poker Bot-Cheating Incidents in the millions of dollars!

I've been talking about it every since the publication of my book "Dirty Poker." The poker-cheating beat goes on and on and on, just like that song by Earth Wind and Fire. I predicted this influx of online poker-cheating, and I took lots of heat from it, mainly from online poker cheats disguised as honest online poker players wanting to prevent the online poker community from getting a bad rep.

Well, ladies, gentlemen, and poker bots alike, that rep is here and it's real. If you don't want to hear it from me, just go to the online poker-bot cheating articles linked to below. If you are not convinced that the black holes of the poker Internet world are voided by online poker cheating, think again. It has always  been there and it is there to stay!

Article one

Article two

Okay, now that you have read them, do you want to know why online poker-bot scandals are so common? Because it remains one of the safest forms of online poker cheats. As far as I know, no one has ever been convicted of a crime in any jurisdiction for using poker bots to cheat at online poker.

And I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

Multiple ID-user who is WSOP bracelet winner to serve time in prison for online poker cheating!

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've heard of anyone actually doing time for online poker cheating, but that is the case for this World Series of Poker champion who is going down for having cheated scores of online players through using multiple accounts and player-positions at the online tables.

Darren Woods, a WSOP bracelet winner in 2011, has been sentenced to 15 months in jail over in the United Kingdom and ordered to repay a hefty sum of £1 million after he cheated for years at online poker.

Woods engaged in fraudulent misconduct on 888.com and several other sites by setting up an elaborate scheme to play multiple hands at once at the same online poker table, according to the Grimbsby Telegraph.

The report added that he will receive six more years in jail if he doesn’t pay back £1 million.
Some of the money he has already forfeited will go to online poker operators to help compensate victims of his cheating schemes. The 29-year-old originally denied 13 of the fraud charges, but later changed his plea to guilty for nine of the charges.

The cheating occurred between 2007 and 2012.

Woods’ father admitted to helping him launder £230,000 won from the scams. (What a nice father!)

The poker pro set up fake identities and used private online networks to help him hide the scams from the online poker firms, even cheating on 888 which once employed him as a sponsored player and trusted him with representing the brand. Altogether, he admitted to creating 50 different accounts to help gain huge edges over opponents.

The judge said to Woods: “You are an intelligent, able and even gifted young man but you turned your talents towards defrauding online gambling companies and cheating other players of online poker. In individual games, other people playing against you stood to lose money because the odds had been rigged in your favour by the creation of multiple identities which were undisclosed to other players.”
According to HighstakesDB, Woods’ cheating was uncovered by diligent members of the poker community who determined that his win-rate was too high to be legitimate. Woods came out to defend himself online, but mounting evidence reportedly lead to his conviction in the minds of the poker community well before a court of law sentenced him to prison.

Woods actually claimed he was a victim, reportedly justifying his actions by alleging that other players have cheated in the past too, without getting caught.

My take: You're right Darren, loads of other players have done exactly the same thing, but you're the one who got caught! I don't know if they allow prisoners to play online poker in the UK, but if they do, remember, Big Brother will be watching you!

Is This World Series of Poker Cheating Allegation Real?

Accused poker cheat

The Las Vegas Review Journal published this article about suspicions of cheating at the World Series of Poker. Have a read and then check out my take on it.

 World Series of Poker officials said they are investigating allegations that a player cheated his way to a fifth-place finish in one of its most prestigious tournaments. The alleged incident took place during the $10,000 Heads-Up No-limit Hold ‘em Championship that ended Thursday and were levied against Valeriu Coca of Moldova. “We are aware, monitoring very closely with all the resources at our disposal. Those include surveillance/security, forensic examination of cards, etc,” WSOP tournament director Jack Effel wrote on Twitter.

“We take integrity very seriously, as evidenced by our lifetime bans, and would enjoy nothing more than catching a cheater in our midst.” Coca defeated five opponents in the Heads-Up Championship before losing to eventual winner Keith Lehr in the quarterfinals Wednesday at the Rio Convention Center.

According to PokerNews.com, Connor Drinan believed there were several irregularities in Coca’s play during their match in the round of 32 and posted his concerns on the TwoPlusTwo online poker forum early Thursday. Drinan also spoke with other players who faced Coca in the tournament and had similar suspicions. The players then contacted Effel later Thursday and WSOP officials began their probe.

“We take these types of allegations very seriously & an investigation began immediately upon learning them. It is ongoing,” WSOP spokesperson Seth Palansky wrote on Twitter. “Preliminary testing of cards show no markings or use of any foreign solution. Further tests will be done to confirm initial.” Palansky wrote in a text message Friday morning that the cards from the tournament remain out for testing and that officials will be “thorough in conducting” their investigation.

Coca collected $54,545 for his fifth-place finish and denied any wrongdoing in an interview with PokerNews.com. “This is a fantasy,” Coca told the website through a translator. “The players who lost are very good, so they just don’t believe they could lose to me for an honest reason.”

My take: Well, the only poker-cheat vehicle I see here is card-marking and that would be very unlikely at an event as prestigious as the World Series of Poker. I know that Coca has been accused of marking cards in poker games in the Czech Republic, but to pull it off successfully would be much more difficult at the world's most important tournament. In the '90s the WSOP was rampant with poker-collusion cheating syndicates, but today with such huge numbers of players entering the tournaments, even the ages-old collusion-cheating methods would be difficult to pull of fruitfully. Thus I would have to agree with the accused poker cheat here and say it's just a bunch of losers who don't know how to lose.

However, in the WSOP ring games, where real cash changes hands with rapidity, the poker-collusion cheat teams are much more rampant.

The Big, The Small and the Ugly!

Big-time Casino Cheat

Casino cheat scams range in all types and sizes. Recently there have been two of them as far away from each other on the casino-cheat spectrum imaginable.

So let's start with the Big: A Singaporean man defrauded the Solaire Casino in the Philippines for $8 million using a series of fraudulent bank wire transfers to get the casino to surrender $8 million in gaming chips. The casino eventually recovered $3 million of the chips but it is still stuck the rest. Read the article here and then see my take on it.

My take: Well, just about every casino in the Philippines and Singapore has been the target of all kinds of major scams, both financial and on their very gaming tables. Security and surveillance is terribly weak in these two hot casino spots, so I expect the proliferation of varied casino scams and financial scams related to casinos to continue right on into the next decade, probably even into the decade after that!

Now let's go to Small: A woman got arrested at Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course for swiping a $5 losing-bet from a mini-baccarat table. That's right, you heard me! A five-dollar losing-bet! And they actually arrested her! So what is this world coming to...or I should say, What is this casino-cheating world coming to? The woman claimed that she didn't intend to swipe the chip, that the dealer simply didn't take it, so she simply pulled it back from the table.

My take: Well, this might be a tiny, minute variation of my famed Savannah pinch move, but surely is not worthy of an arrest for God's sake!!!

Big-Time Card-Marker Caught in UK after cross-country casino-cheat romp!

It may be the oldest scam in the poker-cheating annals but this guy really took it to the hilt. Card-marking keeps keeping pace with all the surveillance and security apparatus designed to stop it. It's a never-ending war that has few cease-fires and very few truces, and it will never had an end or a winner or loser.

Take a look at this article and you'll see what I mean.

How accurate is television in its treatment of poker cheat and casino cheat moves?

Casino Cheat Documentary shot 

By now you've all seen at least two TV documentaries about poker cheating and casino cheating. In the past ten years there have been a flood of them on the History Channel, Bio Channel, Travel Channel, Learning Travel, and even the National Geographic Channel. They all deal with casino cheating but more from the point of view of surveillance and security people rather than the poker and casino cheats. I have heard, however, that National Geographic will air in October or November a special about scams in Las Vegas, including one about professional casino cheats, which will show how they plan their moves, operate in casinos and divvy up the profits. I believe this show will be quite interesting. It will be an episode of its very popular"Underworld Inc." series

So, overall, do TV documentaries depict casino and poker cheating well?

In fact, they do. The general verbiage about the cheat moves is pretty accurate, and those that include real film segments of real casino and poker cheats can make even people foreign to this casino-cheating underworld understand what is going on. The problem is with the shows that do not use the real cheats to film the poker cheating and casino cheating sequences.

One early example of really bad video is the "Breaking Vegas" series that debuted in 2005 on the History Channel. The very first of its thirteen episodes was called "The ultimate Cheat," the life-story of yours truly. Although its detailing of my career cheating the world's casinos was accurate, the filming of the actual cheat sequences was a horror show! This because they used actors, not my ex-casino-cheat buddies and myself, to film the cheat-scenes at the roulette, craps and blackjack tables. Of course, I'd objected to their doing so, but they informed me that due to contractual obligations with actors' unions, the actors had to film the moves without any participation from me.

However, in more recent documentaries about casino and poker cheating, the quality of the film sequences is getting better, so the viewing public can follow along and understand the logic and design of casino-cheating moves. So with this in mind, stay tuned for National Geographic's Underworld Inc. episode about casino cheating, which I think will be called "Casino hustling in Las Vegas."  

How can you get your name removed from Nevada's notorious Black Book?

Okay, you've had a run-in or two with the Nevada Gaming Commission and/or the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and your name is now on the Nevada Gaming Commission's List of Excluded Persons, more commonly known as the "Black Book." And now you're either repentent and want to clear your name, or your a recidivist cheat, or simply an ex-cheat who wants to get back into the business. Once you're on this list you are prohibited from entering a Nevada casino and subject to arrest if caught inside one, although it is only a misdemeanor offense.

So is there any off this list? I konw of only one. You can succeed getting your name removed at a 100% rate of success!

But there is one small "but."

Some of you may have by now guessed it: You're right...you have to be dead. So unless you're a cat with nine lives, or at least two, getting off the NGC List of excluded persons won't do you much good....unless there are gaming casinos in heaven.

And for those of you wondering, Atlantic City and other US gaming jurisdictions have similar "black books" with similar requirements for getting your name off them.

And for those wondering if I am on that list and waiting to die to get off it, the answer is no. I have never been convicted of any gaming crime whatsoever and am clean as a whistle in any casino....at least as far as the law is concerned.

Below is a Nevada Review Journal article about a man who managed to get his name off the list...the hard way!  

Article: 

Commissioners on Thursday voted unanimously to strike Bulgarino from the list after regulators determined in a routine update that he died in Phoenix a little more than a year ago.

Bulgarino was placed on the list Sept. 24, 2004, after he served nearly four years in prison. Identified by the state Gaming Control Board as an associate of Philadelphia’s Bruno crime family, Bulgarino had a criminal history dating back to 1955. In 1999, he pled guilty in federal court for participating in a multimillion-dollar slot machine cheating operation as one of four co-conspirators.

Bulgarino purchased slot machine parts that were used to fraudulently manipulate slot machines. In addition, he actively recruited persons to claim fraudulent jackpots. He admitted that from September 1996 through November 1997, he aided an illegal slot machine scheme in collecting 10 separate jackpots at various Las Vegas casinos totaling $6.1 million, including cheating the Excalibur out of $200,500 in 1996.

Bulgarino also has been on the New Jersey Attorney General’s Exclusion List since May 17, 2006, after he was convicted of conspiracy, interstate travel in aid of racketeering, interstate transportation of stolen property, money laundering and aiding and abetting.

The Pennsylvania Crime Commission identified him in 1980 as associating with the “Bruno La Cosa Nostra Family.” His criminal exploits were chronicled in a book, “Jackpot: The Story of Eugene Bulgarino,” by Tarvis El Alberty.

The List of Excluded Persons, which now has 31 men and one woman, identifies people who have been convicted of crimes against the casino industry and bans them from entering a gaming establishment.

A representative of the state Attorney General’s Office distributed copies of Bulgarino’s death certificate to commissioners at the meeting.

Thursday’s action prompted Commissioner Pat Mulroy to inquire whether there would be a way to streamline the removal process when the person dies.

Control Board Chairman A.G. Burnett said his office always verifies deaths of persons on the list before recommending their removal.