In yet another bad day for online poker the website Pitbull Poker are accused of cheating players out of money. Allegations of both stack shaving, with players saying between $0.25 and $25 per pot are vanishing from their stacks, and super user cheating are being fired at Pitbull and they are not doing a good job of diverting the claims.
Dave Brenes, part of Pitbull Gaming, has been diverting claims of malpractise for a few weeks now on the poker forums. Brenes all but admitted the stack shaving, blaming a coding problem that he said would be quickly rectified and the players accounts reimbursed. That was a few weeks ago, nothing has yet been returned in the form of refunds.
Another allegation was that there was no encryption for hole card data meaning it would be possible to comprimise the site without using super user accounts to get hole card information. According to Poker news daily, the alleged super user accounts have disappeared from the site but skeptical users suggest they are still playing on the site just under new screen names.
There is not the buzz for this scandal due to the size of the site with an average of only 50 users on the site before allegations began on the cheating. Pitbull have plenty of explaining to do and are not doing a very good job of doing it. Certainly there is more to gain in the short term for a site like Pitbull to cheat but it remains to be seen whether or not they have cheated. At present, the ball is in their court to clear their name. Each day they do not do so is another day where their reputation continues to suffer.
We will keep an eye out for future developments on this story.
