Paddy Power Poker

Pitbull Poker, part of the Flash Poker Network, seems to be making a dogs dinner of proceedings as it tries to deal with cheating allegations.

The Costa Rican based client, fuelled by Adobe Flash web technology, has been hit by allegations of ‘stack shaving’ and super users from twoplustwo forum members. ‘Stack shaving’ involves the random loss of between $0.25 and $25 from a stack, where as super users traditionally use hole card revealers to cheat accordingly.

Deciphering the exact nature of the allegations is pretty tricky given page after page of posts. The initial accusations come from ‘chesterboy’, seen here, as he describes the faultless play of $2/$5 ‘super users’. Chesterboy alludes to their perfect short stack strategy and ‘donk’ bets (out of position bets), made only when he holds ‘air’.

Further suspicion was aroused when Pitbull Poker were distinctively shady about hand history requests. Pitbull network manager Dave Brenes expressed difficulties in changing the hand histories to a sendable / viewable form – i.e. so they could be examined in Poker Tracker. It was on such software tracking tools that the Ultimate Bet scandal was exposed.

There seems to be inconsistencies in Brenes’s responses; despite initially stating, ‘any competent programmer could come up with a way to convert the data into a sendable form’, he later disclosed, ‘we cannot request hundreds of hands from different accounts from the DB, it's an overwhelming task for the system’.

Several examples of questionable hands have been posted on the twoplustwo forums, but until Pitbull Poker supply a comprehensive hand history in readable format, nothing is concrete. Pitbull have also been accused of operating servers illegally in Panama, and hiring a scam artist called Kevin Baronowky to develop and launch the software. You can read more about Pitbull Poker’s shady past here.

With larger, more reputable networks available, it’s probably best avoiding the Pitbull’s kennel. Stay tuned for more updates as the saga unfolds.