Author: kurt

In our previous blog post we touched the big cheating attempt at Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Today we want to continue on the topic of cheating in online poker and ask ourselves a few questions.

Can Something Like This Happen Again?

To be blunt: Yes. There can and will be attempts of fraud no matter whether we are talking about poker, buying cars or whatever else. Wherever money is involved you will find crooked people who try to take advantage. This has been the case forever, the internet simply provides more and easier means to do so. In the case of online poker this doesn’t necessarily have to happen with superusers (as discussed in How Secure Is Online Poker? – Part I), there have been and will be enough other attempts that are however in general prevented by the poker rooms before they happen or at least caught when they do take place. This is also a reason for some of the restrictions that players have to endure when playing at some online poker rooms – they don’t simply want to annoy you by letting you wait for your money when cashing out for example, it is simply an added security measure for everyone involved.

So should you abstain from online poker? Well, that comes down to your personal discretion. It should be mentioned however that you can do your part trying to avoid getting ripped off. First of all you need to decide whether a poker room is trustworthy. At Max Poker Bonus we do not present any poker room where the integrity has been questionable at any point. We also clearly advise against rooms like Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet (UB just recently had a software flaw – as was the official statement – where a certain Phil Hellmuth ended up winning a Heads Up despite having the worse hand and as it turned out this wasn’t the only time this happened). We would like to make it known that these things remain the absolute exception (no pun intended) in online poker. If you steer clear of dubious rooms with a questionable reputation the danger of getting cheated is indeed very small.

What Do The Poker Rooms Do About It?

Personally I am convinced that in general all the well-known and so far respectable poker rooms are virtually fraud-free. The big poker rooms will usually invest a lot of money and time to make sure no cheating takes place simply because they want to avoid their name being connected to any fraud. It is nearly impossible (as well as very expensive and time consuming) to restore one’s image after such a scandal. Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet thrive on the lack of information of new players which also the affiliate industry is to blame for. There are still a lot of affiliates who put their own profit ahead of their customers’ security and well-being and who still actively promote poker rooms like Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Some of the bigger and older affiliate programmes even list them in their Top Ten – simply because they get great deals from them (otherwise no one would list poker rooms with such bad reputation on their site). We want to put as much distance between those kind of affiliates and us which is one of the reasons that we only accept a poker room in our listing after careful research and talks with responsible personnel as well as active poker players.

An important factor concerning the security of online poker is the huge poker player community. Often times people don’t realise how much power and means of control this crowd of poker players actually possesses. The prime example for this is once again the Superuser Scandal mentioned in the previous blog post – while the management denied and disavowed everything as long as possible the community prevailed despite havin limited tools and access. The fraudulent actions were being monitored by thousands of poker players and eventually proven step by step. It is nigh impossible to keep something hidden from thousands and thousands of people, some of whom spending more than 10 hours playing online poker each day.

How Secure Is My Poker Room?

Unfortunately it can be very difficult for new players to assess the security situation of a specific poker room. Even more so when some rooms pretend to be above all speculations by using some famous professional poker player as their figure-head. Ultimate Bet for example uses Phil Hellmuth to promote and no matter what you may think about him as a player or a person, he has high profile and sells very well. It is just a shame that in this case he seems primarily interested in making money (which we assume he doesn’t really need anyway) regardless of how it affects his reputation among some of the long-established poker players (some may say that he obviously never cared about his reputation his whole life the way he behaves on and off the poker table). Be that as it may, it still is a very big selling point for Ultimate Bet.

To be upfront: There are no guarantees. It is hard to guarantee the honesty and integrity of other people. We can ensure you however that we do very thorough checks (which sometimes drive our contacts at a poker room crazy) before adding an online poker room to our list. Therefore our limit of 10 poker rooms on Max Poker Bonus at any given time. We want to distinguish ourselves from most other affiliates by offering you quality over quantity. Yes, we could offer a hundred rooms but we would not feel comfortable telling you that it is a good idea at a poker room that we are not completely certain about. And if you profit from our quality and thoroughness we will profit as well because we thrive on being mentioned with a positive image. Which is why we have no interest to be connected to rooms like Absolute Poker or Ultimate Bet. We can only wish for more fellow affiliates to advise their customers against dubious poker rooms instead of presenting them on their website and hush up all the existing problems.

So please read up on the poker rooms that you might be interested in and trust your instincts when they tell you that something sounds to good to be true (because usually that will be the case, not only in online poker). We would also like to take the opportunity to suggest you contact us if you think that there is something shady going on in any poker room (it doesn’t even have to be one in our current list as we will archive everything for future reference) or if you have to wait too long for a withdrawal, the client support is unfriendly or incompetent,… We count on you to let us know so we can take the appropriate action and confront the responsible people as well as reconsider whether this room deserves a spot on our list.

At this point we would also like to thank the players who have sent us information thus far. The negative as well as (so far) overwhelmingly positive feedback really helps us evaluate the poker rooms presented on Max Poker Bonus. The community of poker players lives on relaying of information in order to effectively take measures against equivocal poker rooms.

We would also like to once more direct your attention to our RSS Feed that will keep you informed at all times, be it about serious topics like this, promotions, special bonus offers, info on tournaments or players,…

This question poses itself to a lot of new and prospective online poker players but also every now and then to those amongst us who are online poker veterans. In an age where credit card fraud and other criminal activities are omnipresent in the internet one has to ask the question, why online poker should be any different. The thing is: it isn’t.

Just like anywhere else there have been various accusations against specific poker rooms, some incredible incidents have since surfaced and tens of millions of dollars had to be paid in compensation to deceived poker players. The biggest and most famous incident so far was clearly the scandal that involved so called superusers – Absolute Poker as well as Ultimate Bet were the two poker rooms where players were cheated out of millions and millions of dollars.

The fraudulent action was practically identical as in both poker rooms so called superusers cheated in online poker games and made a huge profit at other players’ expense. In both cases the deceived players got their money reimbursed but only after the players could gather enough evidence through their own research. These scandals showed that the U.S. ban on online poker caused companies like Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet to simply open some shady back doors. They registered their companies offshore and since then pay continuously for “official” licenses from companies that do not much more than simply sell them a seal that basically means nothing but feigns a false sense of security for players. When the superuser scandal became public everyone realised that these “official” control organs did anything but control the poker rooms in question and that they actually had neither the desire nor the possibility to prosecute anyone for their fraudulent behaviour.

What is a Superuser?

Generally speaking a superuser is someone who has more access rights than a normal user and thus gains advantage. In the case of Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet these superusers could see all the Hole Cards on the table. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that even the worst player will become a great champion if he knows his opponents’ cards. The incident involved huge amounts of money and the first accusations of cheated players were labelled as defamations and whining. After a closer inspection however the community of poker players was able to gather more and more indications and was able to track an odd player behaviour after watching thousands and thousands of the hands in question.

When those suspicious facts became too many to simply let the whole thing die down, lady luck played her part: A player requested a hand list of the suspicious user and an inexperienced Absolute Poker employee sent a file that had the hands with all the cards visible. That made judging the plays and the whole situation so much easier as that player now had the ability to see the table as they suspected this superuser saw it. It all clicked and finally, after months of denying, the Absolute Poker management had to admit to the fact that there was a superuser and fraudulent action had taken place. While this superuser account was only able to watch tables he simply passed on his information to his accomplice who played with a normal user account.

Looking back there were more than just a few obvious indications for Absolute Poker to assume the accusations that had been brought forward were justified (for example the fact that this superuser and his partner in crime always switched tables together) – nonetheless the management did what they could to dismiss this all as conspiracy theories. Eventually they had to admit that two very senior employees (Scott Tom and AJ Green) were guilty of these accusations and while Absolute Poker complied with reimbursing the cheated players their money, they also saw to it that no law suits were filed against those two. Up until now no one has been arrested or brought to trial. This whole situation showed that a legalisation of online poker in the U.S. would not only allow them to profit financially due to the taxes paid but also help to be able to effectively control and monitor online poker companies and eventually bring responsible people to justice. As of now none of the deceived U.S. players can really sue the people responsible because they themselves were not allowed to play online poker in the first place.

Coming Soon…

The second part of this blog topic will take a closer look at the current situation of online poker security. While several poker rooms simply proved their reliability and integrity over many years or are operating in a very clearly and strictly defined legal environment (like bwin Poker – situated in Austria where online poker is legal and state-controlled) there are unfortunately still enough online poker providers that have a bad reputation among insiders, be it because of shady business in the past or the fact that judging by the number of players over the past few years they should not be able to sustain themselves let alone gain money.

We will examine how likely fraudulent behaviour is for (so far) respectable rooms and what you can do to help defending yourself against possible fraud. We will also take a look at how safe your preferred poker room might be and whether security can actually be guaranteed when a famous professional poker player stands for the quality of a poker room with his name.

Don’t forget to make use of our RSS Feed in order to stay up-to-date at any time and to make sure you won’t miss any news in the future.

Max Poker Bonus has been growing rapidly over the past months. Not only did we manage to bring new poker rooms to you by acquiring big names like partypoker and Everest Poker, thus having a total of 9 rooms on our site and being only 1 room short of the maximum amount of rooms that we want to present at any given time in order to assure you top quality instead of quantity. We also have been busy behind the scene talking about the final tenth poker room and have decided in favour of a very well known brand – details to follow once the talks have progressed.

As I have previously mentioned in our blog we were able to get a special deal with BestPoker enabling Max Poker Bonus players to clear their poker bonus much faster than usually. We have received a lot of positive feedback on that matter which of course in turn assured us that we are heading down the right road and will continue to put our efforts into negotiating new and better deals with our poker rooms for our visitors.

But that is not all. Additionally to our already well known Bonus Calculator and Poker Odds Calculator we also added another feature, the M-Calculator. This new tool allows you to immediately calculate your M-Variables according to Harrington and adjust your playing style depending on the zone you are in. For those of you not familiar with mentioned “M” – you will find an explanation with our calculator. In few words, you should adjust your playing style in a multi table tournament according to your stack size. Professional poker players do it so why shouldn’t you? Of course there are more factors to consider but your own stack is the pre-dominant factor that determines what you can and should do.

We are of course constantly trying to bring you new features and information as well as poker bonus offers. You should make sure to use our RSS Feed in order to be up-to-date and informed as new things develop. We are looking forward to hearing from you if you have any concerns, questions or ideas. Simply contact us and we will get back to you.

May the poker gods be with you and steer you clear of bad beats!

So we have launched our UK version of Max Poker Bonus on Wednesday the 24th of September and are of course happy and proud parents of our latest baby. But September has been a very important and successful month for more reasons than that. The last weekend of the month has seen us attending the CAP Barcelona and striking some great deals that will benefit you, our partners and our site. A future which already looked bright has become even brighter after the CAP Barcelona 2008 and our existing and new partners have expressed a lot of interest and confidence in our project which we appreciate a lot.

We are proud to have the backing of some of the really big names in the industry and we will ensure that you as players will get the best deals and support so you can simply focus on playing poker. If at any time you have suggestions, ideas or complaints of any kind we will be more than happy to hear from you – simply contact us with anything that is on your mind (well, poker related if possible… although we might be happy for you purchasing that new car that you always wanted we feel that you should rather tell your wife about it even if you risk her asking you for a diamond ring afterwards).

As mentioned the CAP was very successful for us and our project and despite all the exhaustion of that busy weekend we will make sure to update a lot of info in the upcoming days as well as implement the last few missing pieces of the English site (payment methods and our glossary). In the meantime we encourage you to check out some of our other features like our already famous Max Poker Bonus Calculator, Poker Odds Calculator and our constantly updated Tournament List. Having said that we already have a lot more planned – people who know us from our German Max Poker Bonus website already know that this is never an empty promise and we will live up to it. Look forward to not only a full implementation of all the features already in use at the German version but additional features as well as some fine tuning on already existing ones in order to make comparing poker rooms, bonuses and other interesting information even easier and more accessible.

On a side note: another thing we learned in Barcelona was to cut down on our sleeping hours drastically and learn to sleep while commuting on the metro to and from meetings. We will try to perfect this to a point where we actually “anti-sleep” and will be able to get 28 hours of work stuffed into one day – our goal is not a 24/7 work ethic but to reach at least a 28/8.

A lot of our future plans have now become reality and we are of course very excited about that. We will not be running out of ideas any time soon (or ever) which for you means that there are good and interesting times ahead indeed. If you are serious about playing poker you have come to the right place. We will make sure to provide you with our Austrian semi-pro poker player’s (who coincidently is called Max) blogs and tips that have already proven valuable to many other players. We are convinced you will like what you see and you will profit from our offers.