With most of the legal jeopardy and fallout from the Department of Justice indictments waning, there has been an uptick of information coming out regarding the goat rodeo that was Full Tilt Poker operations post-Black Friday....
(alternate headline: It’s Time to Short William Hill Stock) After Federated Sports+Gaming crashed and burned more spectacularly than any company in poker history, many wondered if Jeffrey Pollack, Annie Duke, and others would...
Whether or not UltimateBet has any staying power in sponsoring major MMA fighters/events after this month remains to be seen (we say "no,"), however, Bluff Magazineis reportingthat they did just finish a deal to patch up Chuck Liddell for UFC 97.
Liddell wore Poker Stars at the 2008 WSOP Main Event and is one of the few fighters not to have a big Full Tilt sticker on his ass during a fight in recent months.
Unlike Full Tilt Poker, who slapped patches on just about every fighter in the octagon, UltimateBet seems to be taking a cheaper more targeted approach.
Tilt may still end up as a UFC sponsor after this month though, as UB has nothing guaranteed past 97. And Bluff notes they are still carrying on promotions:
"Full Tilt has been running a series of freerolls for Canadian players that would see them travel by train with Howard Lederer, Erick Lindgren and Gavin Smith to see UFC 97. Given the relatively quick notice it is unlikely that Full Tilt would cancel their promotion."
About halfway through the interview, Gary describes how RawVegas.tv "very rudely" intruded on Layne and Russ' "private time" (because, you know, allegedly stealing at least $6 million from your friends and then going AWOL isn't even remotely rude). Layne says that when he saw the cameras, he "knew that wasn't a spot for me to be in."
Layne also said that he knows "for a fact that Russ Hamilton's lawyer said 'don't say a word.'"
Now the one thing we always felt Layne was unfairly skewered for in that video was that he may have just been golfing with Russ because he's a gambler and saw an edge he could exploit. Makes sense. Pretty common. Layne says that that's a "fair" assessment of why he was with Russ that day. Not that we were expecting him to say something else though.
But then Layne completely discredits himself by saying, "If [Russ] took all of this money…how can one man do this without being caught?" to which Gary said, "That totally makes sense."
Yeah, kind of hard to believe how Russ could get away with something like that with a company that he started and was integral in developing the software for…inconceivable.
Hey, while we're talking about Russ Hamilton, (not surprisingly) Mike Matusow had some things to say. Matusow is kind of like a (degenerate gambling version of) fine wine…the dude is getting better (and more entertaining) with age.
Let's kick off the first of our NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship red carpet coverage with Phil Hellmuth. We weren't planning on "going there" regarding asking about Russ Hamilton and the UltimateBet cheating scandal, but after mentioning golfing with Layne Flack for a Golf Magazine story, well, it kind of opened the door…
We had former FBI agent and current WSOP Academy instructor Joe Navarro take a look at the Russ Hamilton video footage from last week. Navarro is an expert in analyzing non-verbal communication, which is perfect since Russ didn't utter a fucking word.
Some interesting points, though the one that really sticks out is this: if Hamilton's golfing buddies (particularly Layne Flack) really thought he was innocent of cheating his friends and other people out of millions of dollars on UltimateBet, would they have dodged out of the camera's view as fast as they humanly possibly could?
After some technical difficulties,* Part I of the Wicked Chops & Gavin podcast is now up. We recorded this one at the Casa de Gavin, so it’s possible that you’ll hear some crying children in the background for the first 15 minutes. In related news, Gavin Smith is a father. In this one, we cover [...]
Here’s Part 2 of the latest Wicked Chops & GavinTM podcast. What happened to Part 1? Some back-end technical difficulties that we’re blaming on Falcon Heene. Little fucker is at it again. Part 1 should be up later today. So Part 2 of the podcast was based on a brilliant Gavin Smith idea: the Awesome [...]
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