Kahnawake Gaming Commission Releases Decision on UltimateBet Cheating Case

The Kahnawake Gaming Commission (KGC) released its final decision regarding the UltimateBet cheating scandal on September 11th, 2009. The Gaming Commission once again reiterated that cheating did happen on the online poker site and that Tokwiro Enterprises, the owner of UltimateBet, had returned a total of $20 million to its affected players.

Tokwiro Enterprises was also fined a total of $1.5 million over the incident. KGC Chairman Dean Montour said that despite the unfortunate circumstances that resulted in this cheating incident, they are satisfied that the actions taken by the Kahnawake Commission provided an adequate compensation for affected UltimateBet players.

Montour said that they remain optimistic that this situation and the lessons learned from it will result in a higher standard gambling regulation for gaming groups licensed and regulated within the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake and elsewhere in the US. According to the Gaming Commission decision, the ability to see the hole cards was enabled by an illegal software placed on the UltimateBet servers before November 2005.

A thirty party account was then used to see the players' hole cards and the information passed on to the accused. The user names on the accounts maintained by the accused were changed often in an attempt to avoid discovery.

The Gaming Commission named 1994 world series of poker Main Event champion Russell Hamilton as the person it believes is responsible, adding that there were thirty-one people who were connected to different degrees with Russell Hamilton when the alleged cheating happened.

Names were not released to the public. In total, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission's revealed twenty-three accounts with 117 different usernames were utilized to facilitate the cheating scheme and the cash was disbursed with the help of player-to-player transfers on the online site.

September 21, 2009
Jeremy Evans