Poker Pro Phil Hellmuth in Online Poker Hand Scandal
The popular TwoPlusTwo.com posting forum has been screaming for the head of UltimateBet.com celebrity spokesperson, Phil Hellmuth.
AintLuck.com explained the situation:
A poster to the twoplustwo.com forums discussed a hand which occurred between Hellmuth and a player named Doubleballer during a heads up limit hold'em $200/$400 matchup over the weekend. At the beginning of the hand, Hellmuth had $4,495 and Doubleballer had $7,495. After the players capped the pre-flop betting round, the flop brought Js Kc Kh. The turn was the 2 of hearts and the river was the 9 of clubs. After all of the betting was done, the pot had swelled to $5,599. On the river, Doubleballer showed down his Kd-Qh for 3 Kings while Hellmuth's hand was mucked. However, the pot was shipped over to Hellmuth and Doubleballer was knocked out of the game momentarily due to an internet issue.
After reconnecting, the two players discussed the hand and Hellmuth told his opponent that he won the pot with the three kings. However, when play resumed, Hellmuth had $7,294 in chips and Doubleballer had $4,694 in chips proving that the chips were shipped to the Poker Brat despite his losing the hand.
Doubleballer, whose twoplustwo name is DaBruce took to the message board to discuss the events and what was happening in his attempts to get the money that was rightfully his. He stated that he was on the phone with someone from UltimateBet and that she was going to discuss what happened with a supervisor and they would review the hand in question. After a few minutes she got back on the phone and profusely apologized to the player and immediately credited him with $2,300 and the balance would be refunded in a few hours.
Conspiracy theorists at the TwoPlusTwo forums question whether this is the first time such an incident although there is nothing to suggest it ever has.
"If this is new software, it is probably in pretty active development, meaning server-side code is being updated frequently. If this was a bug, it could have been introduced very recently," commented one poster on a thread that now goes beyond 57 pages. "Also, just because the player involved didn't think he was disconnected, and it was just a "missed blinds msg", doesn't mean that there weren't actually a series of short disconnects that would not be noticable to the player. Chances are we will never know the cause of the problem, but people love to guess."
This same poster doubted that Hellmuth would be involved in such a cheating event.
"The likelihood of PH being involved in some deliberate cheating is zero in my opinion, if simply for the reason that in order to cheat, he would have to believe he needed to cheat. With his ego? No chance. Not to mention the amount of covering up that would have to happen: think of the audit trail left by a hand history."
Gambling911.com's Jenny Woo sat down in an interview with Phil Hellmuth just last week.
Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
