I was discussing this with Druff today, how if UB offered me $1M / yr to represent their company I would snap-decline, with middle fingers to the sky (if they don't like that reply)

I couldn't look at myself in the mirror after writing a blog like that.

The pit of my stomach would hurt and I'd likely develop ulcers when they made me tweet about upcoming UBOC events...

Imagine how you'd feel walking by Mike Matusow!

I sold out once in my life - I sold NWP to Tony G. I did that shit for money, and I regret doing it. If faced with a similar situation there is no way I would sell DonkDown. I know I said that about NWP but now I am older and wiser and dead certain of this statement. I understand this project doesn't work unless it remains independent.

Similar to Joe's situation - he is no longer independent, as he is a paid representative of UB. Yet his tone in his blogs is that of a "man of the people" ... i guess that's what pisses me off the most.

Very admirable. You are probably in the .0001 percent of poker players that would turn down 7 figures a year to simply promote a poker company.

Says a lot about what kind of person you are. Major respect...

Easy to say with a zero chance of ub ever making that offer.

Accepting the offer is one thing, putting on this charade like you are actually doing something admirable and you are the hero of the poker community is another story.

Interesting stuff, Mookman.

The stuff you posted is basically what I wondered about myself when UB came up with the $22 million refund number.

If they knew how much they owed the players, they had to use hand histories to determine that. Therefore, why couldn't they send the players the hand histories at the exact same time?

We've never gotten a straight answer on that one.

The rule of thumb when it comes to accusation of wrongdoing is that the man who wants all evidence to be seen is innocent, while the one who wants to keep things hidden is guilty.

For example, if someone accused me of receiving $10k from them on Pokerstars and not sending that equivalent amount to them on Full Tilt, I would likely be innocent if I was offering to let anyone come over and examine my Pokerstars cashier history. I would likely be guilty if my response was, "I didn't do it, but I'm not showing anyone my cashier history because it's none of anyone's business!"

UB would have been far more open and quick with the hand histories if they had nothing to hide.

Anyway, Joe, I'm sure it's really cool having that expensive beachfront pad in the hippest area of Hermosa Beach. I just hope you can still look at yourself in the mirror every night, knowing you've become the mouthpiece for UB's lies.

Also, Joe Sebok did such a good job memorializing Justin Shronk after his sudden passing last year (not being sarcastic here) -- even going as far to arrange having a cartoon drawing of Shronk sitting in the WSOP hallway throughout the summer.

This is ironic because Shronk was always outraged about the UB/AP scandals, and spoke out about them several times. I'm sure he's facepalming up in heaven about this whole thing right now.

Sebok is an epic failer, this UB things is a shitstorm that anyone could've seen coming.

Why should any site even sign him anyways btw? He's a media guy. I suppose it's cause he's very well known in the poker world. He has done great with Poker Road imho. But whenever he refers to himself as a 'pro' I cringe because I know what it means to be a poker pro and he ain't it.

Sebok used his media (PokerRoad) to publicize the UB scandals. By signing Joe, UB instantly shut his voice up.

PokerRoad was a very interesting media site at one time(esp. podcasts, imo), but it has greatly declined since Sebok joined UB. Perhaps Joe is stretched too thin, perhaps just a coincidence.

*** First, LOL the dog ate my hand histories. ***

- - - - -

Second, let me try to clarify the situation around the storage of hand histories as best as I am able to, given that the information I had was only partial in this matter. There's a certain asswipe who's written that I often make mistakes when and where technical matters are concerned, this despite the fact that I actually majored in computer science back in the day. That my education in those fields has atrophied over the years because I've gone more in the direction of writing, editing, business and marketing doesn't mean I know nothing about computers; it's just that I don't delve into those areas as deeply or as often as I used to.

As it was told to me, the problem between the old hand histories and the newer hand histories at UB that Leggett always cites as a problem came about when they migrated the end-user query platforms from MySQL to Oracle. I glossed over that far too quickly when I wrote it and was pilloried for it. These are query languages, with relational-database structures, designed for the end users. (Back in the day I actually did a fair amount of SQL programming, but that's another matter.)

Now, anyone with a bit of CS education knows that the above explanation is technically insufficient, because these queries, along with the languages in which they are written, are really just differences in how one looks at a certain file or series of interrelated files, meaning that the change from MySQL to Oracle itself cannot explain the supposed difficulties in going back and getting the older HH's. The files themselves must exist within the framework in which they were created, and even in the thin likelihood that the raw file formats were modified -- or that AP and UB formats differed significantly and this is the real cause of the supposed disparity -- it should be a straightforward process to go back to a server holding the old UB hands and run whatever file updates are needed to make them more accessible and compliant with the modern system and its users. There were COBOL programmers who made good money for a decade running around changing field formats and associated programs so that the "99" (usually part of a six-digit) date field in a typical business app, was expanded to an eight-digit field so "1999" or "2000" would work. Of course if you had a million lines of COBOL spaghetti code to work through the job was much more difficult.

What I'm trying to say that while I know the user interface changed, there's as yet no definitive answer as to how much the underlying file formats (from old UB to Cereus's UB) changed as well. There's two possible factors that come into play as well; first are the costs associated with doing a full data migration and reprogramming/reformatting from old to new if old is somehow deemed "unnecessary", and second, that the original data-migration process could have been "corrupted" if the programmers were directed to erase or obfuscate certain info. From the outside looking in, no one can ever know for sure.

- - - - -

Third, on to other matters. I did have the chance to see Part II of WCP's series a few hours before it went live. (Thank you, Chops!)
Chops also asked me if I wanted to come on to that show for a few minutes to discuss it, but believe it or not, I declined.

I declined because while I felt that they Joe and Chops and whoever else gave it a good and sincere effort from their perspective, I spotted numerous glaring holes and I did not want to lend my name to their show and story and thereby give it more credence than I thought it deserved. I believe they were fed a carefully constructed craftwork. I told Chops I thought it was maybe 75% correct but I was being generous; what they have there is perhaps only half right, and it will take some time for a lot of stuff to come out and for their errors, albeit innocent ones, to be exposed.

It's not like there aren't a few errors in the stuff I've blogged, but when I started that series I quite intentionally called it "conjecturing" -- go look up the word, please -- and that I was willing to get things wrong here and there, then go back and correct them, if it helped expose the greater truths.

One such example which I have yet to go back and fix is that the original 6.9 million shares that were forfeited were entirely Russ Hamilton's, even though only 4.3 million of those shares could be tied with ease to Russ. I once did some math conjecturing that had a chance of tying Fred David's smaller ownership into that original forfeiture, but I was wrong, and a good bunch of that post -- although it was just a theory trying to connect some facts -- was rubbish. So be it.

- - - -

Fourth, my theory about the complete makeup of those 6.9 million shares being wrong does not clear Fred David. Far from it.

In fact, David's name has been glaringly absent from the recent lists of names. Twenty-eight of the 31 "other" names -- both real ones and fakes -- have now been released, but where is David's name? He was indeed the person connected to the "-fred-" internal transfer account, but suddenly he is nowhere to be found, either on the lists or within the WCP story. Boosheeeet. That smells of an internal legal settlement and/or coverup to me. Other people whose names may have simply been used to front accounts have been publicly outed, but this person disappears from all official mention? Boosheeeeeet.

This was just one of the many big, big problems with the WCP story.

- - - - -

Fifth, people simply do not understand that not only are the published tales of the cheating incomplete, the cheating is part of other, larger stories which have yet to be told. Some of it will definitely come out in the future. Some of it may never come out. My job is just to keep on listening to all the different tales I'm told and figure out which ones make sense.

Haley, your post is way to long for DonkDown.


Druff, wtf? Bush-Esque????? A true republican is never critical of a high ranking republican. Surely you must have learned this as a boy in the Young Man's Republican club.









Wow Micon, Really sick leveling in your post. I love good humor.


I love these kinda threads though. This shit is almost as funny as the 9/11 Commission Report. Who wrote that book anyway?


Sometimes terrible things are meant to be made obvious. The trouble I have is figuring out the endgame and end result. And what motivates these things.

I have no doubt that for $1m/yr Micon would suck Russ's dick once a day and swallow.

That is actually RENTED with his father being the name on the lease.

Hahahahha this is such fucking bullshit. Of course you would take a milly a year to play poker. Put children in the equation with mouths to feed and you would be the most stupid person in the history of poker to decline a million a year just because of morals. The guys who have accepted deals with UB for the most part (outside of Smellmuth) are not in a position to afford to decline because they KNOW that (like you) they have no shot at getting a stars/tilt/any other big poker rooms contract because their personal stock is not high enough.

So lets put it this way.

UB guy comes up to you offering you a million a year to play tournaments which is to cover expenses and tournament entries. At that time (just like now) you are broke and being staked for tournaments and doing well just to get by each month. Then say you just found out that MiconsWhore is pregnant a few months ago and begin to think about how your going to manage for the future together. Lets say you also realise your chances of getting any deal at all from anywhere else for anywhere near a million is extremely low if nothing at all.

Then decline a million a year.

Fucking idiot trying to pretend your the upstanding man of poker. Everyone has a price. I put yours at about 10k.

He doesn't even need to exert himself like this in a blog; the poker community really wants to like Joe, but he is just so irked about separating himself from Barry's shadow he comes off as almost willing to do anything to do so........even if it aligned himself with a company that HAS ripped off people, has not made them whole, and doesn't even want to even CONSIDER helping them being made whole.

He's so conscious about being sponsored he'll almost align with anyone to do it. When he signed with UB, he proved this. FTP and Stars didn't offer him pro status b/c he didn't have the results to merit it; he was just Bear's adopted poker-playing son. UB did, mostly because of his twitter account and Poker Road, which are huge pools of potential customers. He's so eager to get that patch on his sleeve in the tournaments he plays in, he overlooks the integrity of the decisions he makes aligning himself with a company with such a shady past, just to be independent from his father.

He doesn't even need the money that bad; at least when you sold NWP to Tony G, micon, you needed the money. You didn't have someone like Bear to back you up; Joe knows this and hates it (IMO).

The thing is, will Joe even stay at UB for HIS entire career? Did they even give him THAT much up front? If Stars offered him PS Pro status and Barry-like sponsorship, wouldn't he just bail in an instant? I mean I don't know how much money he offered them, but he's only been with them for under 2 years and he's making statements like he's appreciated what UB has done for him so much he's willing to go down with the ship he doesn't even have a room in.

It's just silly that he issues this statement where the good portion of the online poker world still has acquaintances who have not been 100% taken care of; Chinamaniac's situation is a perfect example of UB epically failing. I give Joe some slack, as one poster said here, that he can't move mountain's b/c in the end, he is just a marketing tool, not an actual decision makers and majority shareholders in the board room. Annie isn't either, she and Phil just hold stock. That's the only thing I agree with in Phil's silence on the matter is that I truly feel he knew nothing of what went on and was just a marketing bimbo shill, just like Joe.

No one likes admitting that, though. Joe often in his tweets whines about his bad luck; he just doesn't get how good he has it in his life, and use that as a barometer of success, not what others say or how you feel about getting out of your dad's shadow. His "woe is me" shtick tilts me the most about him.

I'd rather be the guy who, even though under my dad's shadow, gets an insta-life free-roll on college AND playing poker around the world, developing poker social websites in the process, despite having really "bad luck" and results........................rather than being the guy like Druff who was CHEATED of out their HARD EARNED MONEY and got fucked over. His statement proves he is either naive to understand this, or is an egomaniac who doesn't give two fuckin' shits about anybody.

The only way anyone will ever get to the bottom of this is if those at the very top of the pyramid decide to dig up from the ground up and do so.

They never will b/c there is still money to be made. The "contradicting" motivation of doing the right thing will never trump the continued drive to increase profit margins every fiscal quarter.

Khanawake Approved.
\end thread.




From UB.com

Tiffany Michelle...Q&A.

Q. If you had to play poker against a
famous opponent (dead and alive) who would they be and why?

A. "Tiger Woods – I don't know why but he's
one of my favorite sports figures and it'd be fun
to hang out and play poker with him."

I'm pretty sure he was WAY in the hole and did need the money that bad. A terrible poker player who was flushing his step dad's money down the toilet trying to keep PokerRoad afloat.

This post is solid gold.

Micon, bro, we all like you as a person but you are a SHITTY liar. You ramble on about all of your convictions knowing a deal is not even on the table-what a noble man you are. Then of course if the deal were presented you would take it and say something to the effect of we would all do the same thing blah blah blah. Why even open your mouth? Stupid imo. Druff has been vocal the entire time and to be completely honest I thinki he would take 1mil as well. Why not? It's a considerable amount of money to anyone to rep a poker site. Doesn't mean you like the site or support them, just means they are paying you to rep them. THEY are saying YOU are good enough to be acknowledged here, that you are worth their money. Doesnt mean much else. I dont think very many people would turn the offer down unless they were balling out of control. Micon seriously just stop.