Nat Arem, a player who helped investigate the scandal that rocked Absolute Poker.com, sat down with Poker News for a in-depth and straight forward interview in hopes of being able to answer the many questions on players minds from around the world.

The biggest question on everyone’s mind is how exactly the cheating was done.

Arem states, “I was not able to view the cheating method first-hand. AP told me that the vulnerability had been fixed and therefore was not available for viewing.”

"However, the method used to gain hole-card access was described to me as a backend tool called "Servman" that wrote the hand histories before hands were completed. As originally developed, the "game log" supposedly did not display admin-level hand histories until the hand was over. I was told that a software change in mid-June 2007 changed this feature so all hands were written to the database as the hands progressed. The timeline makes sense in a number of ways because there is significant independent evidence that AP was testing their 8.0 client in the mid-June timeframe. Therefore, it's likely that the company made a number of changes to the code on their live-game server to allow for testing of the beta client. I do not know which programmer(s) made the changes and I'm not sure whether it was a mistake or ordered by a higher-up. I was not able to examine source code of the client."

He further went on to explain that he was told which of the account nicknames that cheated were in relation to account #363 although he is not permitted to disclose that information.


- 2007-11-14