Absolutepoker.com and Ultimatebet.com are owned by the same company and there was a case of cheating reported last year on Absolutepoker.com.  In this strange case, there’s a claim of  $75 Million in losses, and another company which sold software to Ultimate, Excapsa Software Inc. of Toronto, is being liquidated in an attempt to collect the claim.

How the money from the liquidation will be distributed is another entirely different question.  Apparently, there’s more than one cheater involved in this scheme so it would be difficult to trace back to all the hands and pots that all these people were involved in.

What a big mess this is.  And this is yet another reason for people to claim that there’s something wrong going on with online poker.  Apparently, at least in this case, they are right.

In my opinion, this is exactly why online poker should be regulated like it is in England, instead of pretending like nobody uses it in U.S.  Of course, regulation doesn’t seem to work very well when the regulators are in bed (literally) with the people they are regulating, but at least there would be something to point our fingers at.

Pokerstars.com is giving away free entries to the WSOP 2008 main event. What’s the catch? Well, you have to come in the top 50 out of 5,000 in your first level tournament. The blinds go up every 5 minutes. Once you do that, then you get to enter the next free tournament, where you must come in the top 2 to win your entry. Also, you can only enter once a week.

If you’re interested in this, login to your pokerstars account, click on “Events,” then “WSOP,” then click on one of the “WSOP $1M Giveaway: Round 1 Freeroll.”

If you don’t mind paying, there are other ways you can get in. There’s a $33 entry tournament where they give away at least 1 WSOP entry. The closest I got was heads-up where I was all-in with pocket Queens against AK <spade> . The flop brought two <spade> with low cards, and you can guess the rest. Damn! So close.

So far, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it to the WSOP this year.