(Update 4/1: AP has repaid customers, but their new explanation leaves a lot to be desired. I recommend reading this post first if you haven’t read it yet, but then see this post for the update.)

Cereus is in the news again, as UB sponsored pro and tweeter extraordinaire Joe Sebok has finally made a 2p2 account to talk about various things. Frankly, reading those threads is just about the most frustrating possible use of one’s time, but for the masochists in the audience, please accept my flower of links: (((1 2 3 4))). ($5 on Stars/FTP to the first person who correctly identifies that reference.)

Basically, what’s going on currently is an argument between Joe and 2p2 in which Joe insists that current Cereus management is clean and 2p2 argues otherwise. (Much of it might actually come down to Joe’s rather lax definition of cleanliness, actually.) Needless to say, the UB/AP superuser scandal is an incredibly big deal. But, it’s so painfully nuanced, complicated, and shrouded in mystery that answering a simple question like “Is Cereus currently run by a bunch of crooks?” is amazingly difficult. So, I’m going to leave the larger scandal to the professionals and sidestep the issue entirely to discuss a much much smaller on-going scandal: Absolute Poker’s rigged keno game and their response. I think that that scandal deserves some more publicity in its own right (and it’s entirely my fault that it has not gotten enough), but I also think it should provide some perspective on the current discussion.

(I think it’s worth noting here that, though this scandal is several orders of magnitude smaller than the superuser scandal, had it happened on any other US-facing network, it would have been huge. The fact that it’s received such disproportionately small attention from the poker community (myself included) is a testament to how jaded we all are when it comes to Cereus.)
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