Guilty Plea for Absolute Founder; Probing for Profit
Absolute Poker Co-Founder Brent Beckley Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy Charges
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By Dan Katz
If you want the latest in poker news, go to www.pokernewsdaily.com
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According to a report by the Associated Press, Brent Beckley, co-founder of the online poker room Absolute Poker, pleaded guilty Tuesday to the criminal charge of Conspiracy to Commit Bank and Wire Fraud. The charge was one of nine listed in the indictment of a total of eleven principals and financial intermediaries of Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker, and PokerStars, which was unsealed in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York on April 15th, known in the poker community as Black Friday.
Appearing before Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis in the U.S. District Court in Mahattan, Beckley admitted that he knew what he was doing was wrong. “I knew that it was illegal to deceive the banks,” he said.
The 52-page indictment described the scheme to circumvent the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, saying, in part, that Beckley “…worked with and directed other to apply incorrect transaction codes to…internet gambling transactions in order to disguise the nature of those transactions and create the false appearance that the transactions were completely unrelated to internet gambling.”
It also read, “At various times alleged in this Indictment…Brent Beckley…worked with other members of the conspiracy to create such fictitious companies – including phony online flower shops and pet supply stores – that established Visa and MasterCard merchant processing accounts with offshore banks.”
Brent Beckley’s sentencing date will be April 19th. The plea deal calls for him to serve between a year and a year and a half in prison.
As a result of the Black Friday indictments, the domain names of Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker, and PokerStars were seized and player funds were frozen. On May 10th, Absolute Poker announced that it had come to an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that was “an important step towards the safe and efficient return of funds to our U.S. players.”
U.S. player funds have yet to be returned.
Absolute Poker has been all but dead since Black Friday. On May 5th, Blanca Gaming, parent company of Absolute Poker and its sister site, UB, announced that it was releasing almost its entire workforce, retaining just a skeleton crew to attempt to continue non-U.S. operations. The next day, Costa Rican law enforcement officials raided the offices of Innovative Data Solutions (IDS), the customer service center for both online poker rooms, reportedly looking for the companies’ executives. The following Monday, all U.S.-based sponsored pros of the poker rooms were released from their contracts.
The non-U.S. operations of Absolute Poker and UB have amounted to virtually nil, as according to PokerScout.com, Absolute and UB’s Cereus Network has averaged just 11 cash game players over the last seven days.
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Raise to Find Out Probe Betting – Probe Bets
by Jesse Knight
Article courtesy of www.playwinningpoker.com – a great place for poker news and strategy articles
It quickly becomes obvious to anyone who has played poker in both brick and mortar establishments and on the internet that they are two very different games. At first, this may seem counter-intuitive. After all, the limits are the same, the rules are the same, and many of the players are the same, so you would expect that the games would play the same, right? Not so fast! In actuality, B&M and internet games play very differently, so much so that players of one strain often have trouble making the transition to the other. There is a very good reason why the games play so differently. It has to do with differences in how information is collected and processed, and used to construct playing strategy within the two formats.
This begs the question: How are the games different? First of all, the players tend to be much more aggressive online than they are in the casinos. This leads to more action in the games, overall. Again, this may seem counter-intuitive. You might expect that internet players would be more cautious and tight, given that they cannot actually see their opponent. But the opposite appears to be true, so what gives?
Let’s regress for a moment and analyze the fundamental nature of human decision-making. Human beings have free will, and they generally make decisions about how to act based upon what they perceive is in their best interest. They do this by collecting sensory information, and processing it, using logical deduction to arrive at a course of action, which is then implemented.
Likewise, in a poker game, players make decisions based upon the information they collect. In a brick and mortar game, players collect visual and audible information as a basis for decision making. They watch for physical movements from their opponents which may help them determine the relative value of their hand. They listen for audible clues that their opponents may give them through their speech. They look for betting patterns from their opponents, which may give them valuable information about how to proceed. All of this information is available at little or no cost to the observant player. We call this type of information “free” information. While all of these sources of information may result in valuable tells for the B&M player, the information which comes from your opponents movements is by far the most valuable. Professionals get most (but certainly not all) of their tells by watching their opponents breathing, and by watching what their opponents are doing with their hands and eyes. With practice, a player’s ability to interpret the strength of their own hand, based upon the physical actions of their opponents, improves over time. When this happens, they will be able to avoid putting money into the pot when they are beat and have the worst of it, based solely upon their reads.
So, good B&M players can avoid putting bad money into the pot based upon their visual and audible reads. This has the effect of reducing the overall action in the game. But many of these reads cannot be made online. Online players cannot watch each other’s eyes or hands, or listen for inflections in each other’s voices. In other words, many of the most valuable tells available to B&M players simply don’t exist online. It is as if every online player were playing with a huge blind spot. The “free” information simply isn’t available.
So, how do online players get information to base decisions on? The simple answer is, they buy it! There is still plenty of information available to the online player. However, much of it is not available for free, you must bet in order to get it. Most of your online tells will come from your opponents betting patterns. Since you have no visual clues about the value of your hand, you can often find out if your hand is any good by betting. If you are raised it is less likely that your hand is good, if you are not raised, it is more likely that your hand is good. Therefore, in online poker, where visual and audible tells are nonexistent, probe bets are dominant. And probe bets beget probe raises. This leads to a great deal more action overall online, than exists in most B&M games.
Think for a moment about your options as an online player. You have to make decisions about your hand, but lack the necessary information. You can flat out guess what your opponent holds whenever he bets, but this is flying blind and obviously won’t work very well in the long run. Neither will paying off your opponent ever time you have a moderately strong hand. Your only remaining option is to make probe bets and raises, and to make your decisions about the relative strength of your hand based upon your opponents’ reactions. Quite often “buying” the information you need in this manner is the only way to get it online.
In conclusion, learning to probe bet effectively is the key to making the transition from B&M poker to online poker. Making the transition from online poker to B&M poker is a little more difficult. This is because the online player will have to learn how to collect and process the “free” information (the visual and audible tells), and make it the primary basis of their decision making. In other words, they will have to stop making so many probe bets, and stop paying for information that is available for free. In addition to this, online players will also have to learn not to give so much free information to their opponents. The online player is not used to the fact that his physical actions can betray his hand’s strength. In other words, he must learn to conceal his tells.
