Last time out, I returned to the follow-up to a story I’d written a couple of weeks ago exploring a connection between the PPA and the St. George, Utah SunFirst Bank payment processing operation at the core of the Black Friday indictments. While the story as written was entirely factual, it led to an unexpected attack upon me from the bosses at Costa Rica-based affiliate site Pocket Fives, a site which historically had strongly catered to US players but now seems to be seeking a future avenue of reentry to that market, and has established itself as both a staunch supporter of the PPA and a convenient mouthpiece for PPA-authored opinions regarding poker matters.
I’d written an original piece at pokerfuse, and a one-off piece, something of an op/ed followup, here at 4Flush around January 31st. The second piece was prompted in part by PocketFives’ Adam Small sending a letter of complaint to pokerfuse co-editor Michael Gentile about my 4Flush piece, which was pretty damn funny considering that 4Flush has nothing whatsoever to do with operations over at the fuse.
I returned to the topic yesterday, along with a full reprinting of the complaint Small sent, which in my opinion should have been sent to me in the first place. This time out we’ll look at some of the issues raised by Small, examine the historically close relationship between P5s and the now-defunct, shamed site Absolute Poker, and pretty much let the chips fall where they may.
Small asserted that rather than being a supporter, PocketFives instead was one of the leading sites in the outing of the cheating at Absolute Tom, along with the exposure of AP CEO Scott Tom as the primary cheater. Throughout September, October and November of 2007, there were indeed multiple threads on the topic of the suspected cheating at AP and UB at PocketFives; then again, there were threads everywhere.
The most information could be found at 2+2, though for either 2+2 or PocketFives to take credit for this is in itself disingenous; it was the players and posters themselves who did the investigating and posted the information, on those two named sites in addition to many others. It definitely was not a corporate effort led by 2+2 or PocketFives.
Small also asserted that, “P5s and its owners were actually instrumental in providing key evidence about Scott Tom’s involvement in the AP scandal.” Really? I’m intimately aware of the steps that took place in outing Tom. I was in an interactive chat with early investigator Nat Arem back in 2007 when I prompted him to do a Whois search on the “rivieraltd.com” address that was attached to an observer account which was monitoring the table where POTRIPPER cheated in the infamous “Crazy Marco” tourney.
That inquiry revealed the rivieraltd.com domain to be a corporate mail server used by Absolute Poker execs. All that remained was to physically trace the IP address listed in Marco Johnson’s weird hand-history file, which was asserted by someone with (I believe) Costa Rica connections to trace directly to Scott Tom’s Costa Rica residence, with the account registered in his girlfriend’s name. I’ve since learned much more about Tom’s fancy home-network set-up, but that instant is the only spot in the tale where Small or someone else at P5s could have contributed anything to the outing of Tom.
A couple of years later, I was the one who convincingly connected Tom to the AP cheating accounts through my publication of internal “ieSnare” screen grabs showing that several different accounts used in the cheating were under the direct control of Tom and others in upper AP management. Again, PocketFives had nothing to do with that.
What PocketFives did have something to do with, just as the information about AP and Tom began to break, was the publication of the cock-and-bull “rogue employee” story wherein the cheating at AP was laid upon an unnamed programmer who “was out to prove a point” (or some similar crappage), a story so ridiculous it was utterly blown out of the water within days.
The back story of that release is where today’s tale begins. It was sent out from the Montreal legal offices of Morden “Cookie” Lazarus, direct to PocketFives for immediate publication… and to no other poker media outlets. In other words, PocketFives, a Costa Rica-based “super” affiliate, worked hand-in-hand with the Costa Rica-based Absolute Poker to propagate a story that was patently false from the outset.
Understanding the nature of the affiliate program at Absolute Poker is also a key to comprehending Pocket Fives’ connection to the AP story. I hesitate to use the word complicity, because PocketFives wasn’t actually part of the AP cheating. Rather, it was an extreme willingness to turn a blind eye at the corporate level to AP’s misdeeds, and contrary to what Small would claim, PocketFives played a significant role in helping a reborn AP establish its online presence a couple of years later.
For those unfamiliar with the nature of Absolute Poker’s affiliate program, all affiliate operations and financial transactions were channeled through a corporate entity called ChipLeader. ChipLeader itself was officially described as a super affiliate representing AP, and was incorporated in Belize, but that was as artificial as the Bahamian flag flying over the Carnival cruise ship Triumph, a paperwork construct designed for financial protection and legal shielding.
ChipLeader was run within AP by a man named Peter Barovich, from its inception in 2002 or so, all the way through Absolute Poker’s dissolution in 2011. Barovich even turns up on documents connected to ongoing AP asset-protection efforts in 2012, long after the company ceased operations, and is believed to be one of a handful of US-citizen AP execs whose ownership interests were hidden in the secretive “Avoine” shell entity. Barovich’s long-term chief assistant, Danielle Burrows, served in her capacity for years and years as well.
Who is Pete Barovich? He’s one of the SAE frat boys from the University of Montana. Barovich wasn’t one of the original four founders (Tom, Gustafson, Blackford and Tatum), but he was one of the next few employees, one of at least four other SAE frat brothers, along with Jess Lohse, Tom Wenz, and Scott Tom’s stepbrother Brent Beckley, to be recruited into the AP scene.
But Barovich wasn’t in Belize; he was right down the hall from the rest of his SAE friends, and the internet abounds with pictures of the AP executive crew (including Barovich) partying away night after night, month after month, on the Costa Rican scene.
That’s the same scene where Pocket Fives, the only large, “super” affiliate poker operation based in Costa Rica, also operated. For PocketFives to pretend they didn’t have a warm and close relationship with AP is ridiculous indeed; they would have worked with Barovich and Burrows on virtually a daily basis… for years.
Hang with the story; it gets much better.
Remember Nat Arem (mentioned above), the early AP investigator who later dropped his investigating while reporting various nonspecific threats made against him? I’m not going to explore the whole Arem thing, but it is time to share a bit more of that tale.
Back in late 2007, PokerNews paid Arem $5,000 to send him to Costa Rica to investigate the AP cheating. John Caldwell, then PokerNews’ Editor-in-Chief, was the driving force behind sending Arem to Costa Rica, with me, as John’s assistant, helping with some of the nuts-‘n’-bolts work.
Arem went to Costa Rica, and I’m gonna call it as I see it: He failed to do his job. He was supposed to report back with his findings based on a series of very tough questions we helped him prepare, and instead he claimed that he signed a non-disclosure with AP while there and couldn’t tell PokerNews the evidence that AP had told him, even though we were the ones that paid his way, and he was working for us at the time.
We took what Arem did send to us and worked it into a three-part Q&A series. The first part wasn’t much good or revelatory, and the second part sucked so bad that we never even ran the third part.
So much for Arem’s trip. Just a few weeks later Nat reported that he’d signed a deal to go to work for Protos Marketing, which is one of the corporate parents of PocketFives or was another entity associated with them, or something like that. He ended up working on a lot of PocketFives stuff, as everyone knows. I can’t help but believe that P5s and/or AP helped negotiate a decent new job for Arem. Whether or not the threats reported by Arem actually occurred, and whether they were physical, financial, or something else is a topic I waffle over to this very day. But I also can’t shake the feeling that Arem allowed PN to pay $5,000 for his Costa Rica job-prospecting trip.
But back to PocketFives. Small brought up my assertion that anti-AP threads weren’t welcome at P5s. To be clear, I wasn’t talking about the outset of the stuff in ’07; I was talking about later on, in ’09 and ’10 when AP pumped up its new Cereus Network and UB.com brands in an effort to run away from all the negative SEO the old names carried along.
Remember the purported sale of Absolute Poker to the Stuart Gordon-led Blanca Games, in August of 2010? That was as faked as fake could be. but again, those were stories that were driven through PocketFives first. (Nat Arem actually posted the news on P5s, which was also dumped onto PRNewswire but not sent to many poker media outlets at all.) Even after AP collapsed in 2011, P5s was right there to serve as an “exclusive” mouthpiece for pro-AP propaganda.
As for Stuart Gordon, he was the operator of a small online-bingo site and was one of Garin Gustafson’s island-hopping drinking buddies. His little bingo operation was about as capable of buying up Absolute Poker’s nine-digit investment base as I was of buying the Rio. Later on it turned out that Gordon paid exactly $0 for his supposed purchase, the exact same price Joe Tokwiro Norton purchased UB and AP for back in late ’06.
Remember that one? UB and AP claimed Norton paid $10 million, then changed it to $5 million, then later gave up the hoax altogether. Likewise, the real nature of Gordon’s “Blanca Games” sham purchase took a year or so to be exposed in subsequent court documents.
The intent of both faked purchases was really the same, to create the false impression that AP was under new management, while the truth is that the same old liars and cheaters at AP were running the show for a decade. Just like Peter Barovich kept on running the ChipLeader ship. Nothing had changed.
Let’s move on to the nonsense about not promoting AP. It’s true that PocketFives, along with many, many other sites, was forced to stop promoting AP for a while. But the very purpose of the faked sale to Gordon and Blanca Games was to create an excuse for a major affiliate to step right in, claim everything was now good, and start promoting AP anew.
Except PocketFives hadn’t even waited that long. Months before, they’d resumed promoting AP and UB while assuring their customers and forum member that AP was now a clean operation. The site included extensive banner advertising and even a dedicated forum, the “Cereus Meeting Place“, which was occasionally manned by “Cereus_Adrienne” and which was started up in May of 2010.
Contrary to Small’s rewriting of history, PocketFives was one of the most active promoters of AP and UB and one of the first to return to jamming the AP, UB and Cereus crap down consumers’ throats after the full extent of the AP cheating was made clear.
Now let’s look at this in a different light. It’s hard to name a poker figure who stepped into the tar pit of the UB and AP scandals, and ended up more vilified today, than Joe Sebok. It’s true that Sebok brought a lot of it on himself, accepting as much as $30,000 a month while allowing AP to use him to help shut up his dad, Barry Greenstein.
It’s also true that AP targeted Sebok because of his prominence in new media and his easy positioning as a path through which to target new players, largely unfamiliar with the earlier AP and UB scandals. The reason Seebs is hated by many is because he sold his soul, and — in mathematically certain terms — there simply must be players who signed up at UB or AP based on Sebok’s reputation and lost their bankrolls because of it.
But here’s the truth. I’d bet the number of players who signed up through PocketFives to play at UB or AP is several hundred times the number of players attributable to Sebok. PocketFives made money on all of them, tons of it, and all of those players lost their Cereus bankrolls as well.
It’s damned convenient of Small to now claim that PocketFives is a paragon of virtue that just won’t rep the remaining US-facing sites to American players. Yeah, they’ve already helped screw over thousands of players and they made their money; they were one of the very first to help re-promote the foul AP ship, a stinking scow with a cheap “Blanca Games” paint job in progress.
Yet PocketFives is allowed to walk away from it all and pretend they’re the good guys, while Sebok is hated? Y’know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Maybe it’s because we expect so little out of affiliates — we really expect them to lie and cheat and steal and tell us everything is all right in La-La Land. Back in 2007, when the AP cheating allegations were first breaking, Jeremy Enke of the PokerNews-controlled Poker Affiliate World forums served up a ridiculous diatribe that if there was cheating at Absolute Poker, the moon was made of green cheese.
Whether or not Enke subsequently obtained some Camembert-laced lunar samples, his piece was driven by financial motives; affiliates desperately wanted the cheating rumors to not be true, because the dollars at risk came from not just the cheating sites, but from their own pockets as well. Discussion on the PAW forums at the time included a very active debate on how to cover up the news or keep it from percolating down to the type of casual poker player and potential sign-up these affiliates sought. It was all very sad.
Not all affiliates were so venal and crooked, but some were, then just as today. Some affiliates are stand-up, too; they won’t represent crap sites that have a history of cheating or otherwise abuse their customers. It’s a complex business, but the truth is this: affiliates are often the most beholden entities of them all. A certain percentage of them cannot be trusted, and they certainly can’t be believed when they tell you the “news”.
When a bad, fake-news affiliate holds itself out as a legit news site and paragon of virtue, bad things happen. Comparing oneself to CardPlayer (a laughable, compromised outlet for three decades) is about as a bad a joke as PocketFives’ Small could muster. It’s “Well, yeah, I’m better than that guy,” while pointing to the used-car salesman with the holes in his shoes.
The thing is, PocketFives has a very real contributory responsibility regarding Absolute Poker. P5s certainly didn’t cheat players themselves or type “Go to sleeeeeeep” from Scott Tom’s den, but they were in a position unlike any other affiliate to understand that everything at AP was the same foulness as always. Instead, they helped re-establish AP and UB as top-US facing sites and served as an active conduit through which thousands of players lost money.
A free pass, they don’t get.
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