Pitbull Poker Closes Its Doors; Literally
Pitbull Poker has been operating under severe scrutiny almost since the beginning of its existence. It didn't take long for players to post about programmed bots, stack shaving, super users, and card exposing in the Pitbull Poker room. It most certainly did not help that Pitbull refused to provide hand histories and other information to dispute the claims of players.
Before long, most of the major online poker forums had threads spanning dozens of pages accusing Pitbull Poker of a slew of security issues.
And suddenly, the company behind Pitbull Poker vanished; or at least they tried to. The report out of Costa Rica is that the owners tried to pull a midnight run during the night only to get caught by their own employees and the police. The night shift employees were told to leave for scheduled maintenance to the building. The employees found this very strange so they decided to stick around to see what was going to happen. They spotted a truck arriving after which individuals proceeded to remove all of the equipment from the office. The employees immediately alerted the police and the owners were arrested by the Costa Rican police. They are now being detained until charges can be made against them.
Pitbull claimed to be a Costa Rica-based online operation, but also represented themselves as being located in the United Kingdom. They shut down completely without any indication that they would pay any of their poker players.
Pitbull Poker was part of the Flash Poker Network. According to several online poker sources, the site was ranked 21st in the world in terms of real money ring game traffic and usually has a 24-hour peak of around 65 players at cash tables. There is no software to download, as the poker room has been built using Adobe Flash web technology.
One of the major allegations goes back to December of 2008 for "stack shaving," where money in a player's stack would disappear between hands. According to several posts, players reported that the range of money that would vanish was between $0.02 and $25. There was a posted reply from Network Manager Dave Brenes of Pitbull Gaming that admitted to this error and supposedly the money would be reimbursed.
The harshest of the allegations came from players claiming they have faced 'superusers'. A 'superuser' is an account that has the ability to see everyone's cards at the table. The allegations outline instances of opponents folding or raising with perfect accuracy and seemingly never guessing wrong, especially when the flop benefitted other players. Dozens of examples have been posted. In short, the 'superuser' would win money for the house and control the rake by cheating, unless you think that seeing other player's cards is a fair advantage.
All the players had asked for was hand histories in a useable text format. This would allow the players to convert them into a format that can be imported into Hold'em Manager or PokerTracker 3 so the community at large can analyze the hands. Unfortunately for the poker community and the victims, Pitbull Poker stated that it would not release any hand histories beyond the format currently provided. The hand history system is based on a tab from within the Flash-based poker room software. Once a user clicks on a link to a hand, it loads in a graphical format. Many players have stated that this reporting system for looking over hand histories is slow and even unstable, as many searches time out and are reset.
Online Casino Showcase is following this story closely and will be bringing you more news as this story continues to develop.
