Checking In On the Internets

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I don’t play much online these days. My entry into poker (after a twenty-year hiatus from nickel-ante five card draw games) was well after the poker boom was on its post-UIGEA downswing.

The first posts on this blog—in early 2011, pre-Black Friday—were mostly recounts of tournaments on Cake (in an attempt to get to the Irish Open), Full Tilt (still waiting for my $20 bucks back, DOJ), and—to a lesser extent—PokerStars. Obviously, the risks now are even greater than before Black Friday, with the possibility that unless you’re playing on the state-restricted sites like WSOP.com in Nevada or New Jersey (and presumably PokerStars in New Jersey in the near future), the US Department of Justice could shutter them just as quickly as it did Absolute, Full Tilt, and PokerStars.

But I’ve taken a flyer on Bovada from time to time because I’d heard their payouts were pretty regular from people I knew and via online forums. Carbon Poker (on the Merge network), not so much, though I like their software, and it runs on the Mac. I did like it when they had the daily HORSE freerolls, I think those gave me the experience to take second place in a live HORSE tournament last year.

America’s Cardroom, on the other hand, I’ve never put money on. I did play a freeroll there earlier this year. On the Winning Poker Network, it hasn’t been plagued with the same stories of lengthy delays for payouts like the Merge network; they’ve even implemented a debit card payout system to circumvent the kind of shenanigans with payment processors that underlaid the Black Friday lawsuits.

Still, I’ve been curious about ACR, particularly with its Million Dollar Sundays. They ran one in December that ran into problems with a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack, then the same thing happened last month, and apparently yesterday. Both of the tournaments in the past month had around a $200K overlay, which may have been the DDoS attack or not enough players willing to pony up the money, or a combination. There are three more scheduled each Sunday in October, ACR stands to lose more then $1.2M if things don’t improve for them.

I wasn’t curious enough to plunk down $540 for a seat (there are freeroll satellites daily at 4:15am, 6:30am, 8am, noon, and 8pm Pacific, according to their schedule), but I did check in on things yesterday, knowing about the overlay in September. At 8pm, I snapped the tournament lobby.

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Registration was closed, players were in the money with nearly $200K in overlay (the amount guaranteed to the winner of the tournament, as a matter of fact).

I watched a couple tables with short stacks break, then clicked on Table 81 and noticed something odd.

For anyone who followed poker news even casually this summer, pro Brian Hastings was accused of (and admitted to) multi-accounting on PokerStars by fellow pro David “Bakes” Baker, in order to play on PokerStars from the US through the use of a virtual private network (VPN) which would allow him to appear as if he was logging in from outside the country, and in order to prevent PokerStars from linking use of his own Stinger88 account to reports of Hastings playing live in the US, he used an account named NoelHayes owned by an Irish player.

No idea whether the account names on ACR are Hastings or the owner of the PokerStars NoelHayes account, or simply inspired by them, but it was an odd coincidence that they both ended up at the same table in a 1,600+ entry tournament and both made the money.

The Brian Hastings account busted within a few minutes of my tweet.