Nat Arem's Blog

I don’t know anything about Blueprint Ventures either. I just know they put out a very funny holiday card. Thanks to my friend Phil Dreyfuss of Bain Capital for showing this to me.

I can’t personally play in it this week, but if you’re a low-ish limits grinder, there’s a good opportunity on Tuesday nights on Bodog Poker.

Basically, every Tuesday night @ 8:35 PM Bodog is running an “Online Poker Blogger Tournament” with $600 added, mostly in the form of 5 entries to the weekly $100K Guaranteed. It’s only a $10+$1 buyin, so if the field is small, it could be a very good overlay. The 5 “bubblers” also get their $11 back in the form of T$, so that makes up the rest of the added money.

The password is “bodogblogger” if you’d like to play.

Thanks to the marketing guy at Bodog Poker for letting me know about this. It’s nice of them to give back to the poker blogger community and offer some added value. I will try to play in the event in future weeks.

Note: Edited on 11/26/07

A followup to Part 1.

Things that I do not agree with, but cannot disprove:

1. Scott Tom was not involved and 2. AJ Green acted alone

Why? Well, a couple of reasons. Note that, as far as I know, the following 5 points are facts. If the fact is based on other info I’ve received and I’m not sure of the info, I’ve qualified the statement. I’ve added a little bit of opinion on the end of some of them, but I put the factual part in italics so it can be easily distinguished.

1. If the information coming out of Amnet is correct, the user 363 and scott@rivieraltd.com IP address actually belonged to one of Scott’s residences. The name on the account came back as that of the female linked to Scott Tom via the plane incident. All of this is assuming that my friend’s source within Amnet is correct, but I’ll assume for the time being that he/she is due to the following information.

2. Someone using the login name of “scotttom” logged into 2p2 regularly from the same IP as referenced above.

3. Scott Tom was clearly either in Costa Rica or in the general area in early September, as indicated by the news article about his plane incident.

4. User 363 was not POTRIPPER as 363 was observing the table and could not have been simultaneously playing on POTRIPPER. In addition, I know that user 363 was one of the other four accounts (see earlier blog post). Therefore, at least two accounts connected to the cheating were logged into AP during the tournament on Sept 12th. That makes it seem like it’s more likely that at least two people were involved. Of course, it’s possible that one person logged into different accounts from multiple machines, but that seems less likely to me than more than one person being involved.

5. Someone using the registered name Scott Tom logged into other poker sites under various player aliases from the same Amnet IP address as is discussed above (ie, the name on the account that was logged in).

I should qualify the following paragraph saying that it is my opinion. It’s up to you what you would like to believe:

“In my mind, the IP has been linked conclusively to Scott Tom and it’s up to AP to show me that he was not involved or ever present while the cheating was going on. I’d love to see things like travel logs, login records, etc. Of course it’s possible that someone was in Scott’s house logged onto AP via multiple computers and that he was never there during any of the cheating episodes, but that seems more far-fetched than other theories. Therefore, until I see something to the contrary, I will personally believe that both Scott Tom and AJ Green were involved.”

3. Scott Tom is no longer involved with AP, UB or any related company in any way, including ownership interest

I just don’t believe this. Knowing how the concept of “ownership” works, I don’t see how AP could have gotten rid of Scott Tom as an owner. Of course, Scott Tom probably owns something multiple levels/shell companies removed from the actual AP organization, but I really don’t care how it’s legally structured. If he’s receiving income from the operation (and I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t be), then he’s an owner. Simple as that for me. And I just don’t see a founding member of the site saying “oh, yea, I don’t want any money from this whole thing for the rest of my life, it’s cool guys” then just living his life out in some city in Panama. I think it’s more likely it went more like “hrmm, it seems like a bad idea for me to be connected, so how about I step away for a bit then ease back in when everything has calmed down? And send me checks here…” and that Scott Tom will, one day, have some level of operational control again. It’s actually a stretch for me to believe that he has zero operational control now, but I guess I can convince myself that it’s at least possible.

During my trip to Costa Rica, I brought up Scott Tom, operational control, ownership control, etc. While the guys I met there were very nice to me and clearly being as open as they were “allowed” to be, I could tell they didn’t feel comfortable talking about Scott. They also didn’t really want to talk about Scott’s ownership of AP or connected companies. While no one came out and said “oh yea, Scott still owns part of the ship”, my read of the whole thing was that he still does.

One important thing to note is that I do believe it’s possible for Scott Tom to receive a check from AP/related companies for the rest of his life and also have AP be a leading site for a long time to come. I don’t personally care if he keeps getting money. I think the problem is whether his friends still at the site will let him ease himself back in over time. That’s a problem in my mind and I feel uneasy about how AP will be controlled down the road.

Alright, so, I was browsing around looking for cool ways to include a photo gallery on a separate wordpress page. The idea is simple… make another page up there in the upper right called “gallery” and then set out getting all of my photos from the last few years from poker events and putting them all up there somehow.

I found something cool called Bookr which is like a photobook tool to display pictures from flickr photosets. I decide to check it out by clicking on the archive link and the first one is some Shakespeare play photoset. Whatever, I was just there to see how it worked, right? I didn’t really care what the pictures were of.

What is like the third picture that I see? Just so I don’t ruin this post for people who can’t help but skip ahead to the picture, I am putting the picture after the “Continue Reading” link (which I basically never use).

More…

I took a look around the Google Analytics for my blog over the last couple of months. First, a couple selected stats:

You can see the AP spike in there. Unfortunately people still leave after just seeing one page, so that does tend to hurt my traffic (ie, lots of eyes, not so many views). But I’m still pretty happy with it, that many people stopping by the blog does mean that at least some people like it enough to bother to come by.

A map overlay of the geographical locations recording visits to the blog. It doesn’t have any real significance, but it’s pretty cool. It’s weird to think that people all over the world are reading this. Central Africa is obv not a fan. Also, f Greenland.

Lastly, here are the top referring keywords on search engines:

This is a little weird. Most of those keywords are normal. I’d expect “natarem”, “nat arem”, “n 82″, etc to be up there for a long time to come as my top keyword referrers (that is basically saying, what did someone type into Google before they found my blog). But macleod51? I know him from P5s, but I have no idea why his name is a top referrer. That’s basically saying that someone typed “macleod51″ into google and then proceeded to click on my blog … a stunning 200 times. The weird part is that when I typed his name into google just now, I don’t see anything leading to my blog. I’m sure there’s a way to drill down more in GA, but I didn’t do that yet. Also, thanks to Jeff and Steve for the slight traffic boosts due to people searching for them.

Lastly, I put up two new pages in the upper right. Nothing groundbreaking, but I do have some ideas for making the blog directory pretty cool.

That’s it for now, time for me to sleep.

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2007/11/absolute-poker-QandA-Nat-Arem-PartTwo.htm

I am still going to post my reasoning for the conclusions in this post. I will likely be posting that stuff this weekend.