Nat Arem's Blog

I blogged about this awhile back (Weird Things Going on at Google – July 3rd, 2008) about problems with poker affiliate sites in Google. It appears that everything has returned to normal for the most part.

CardsChat, Launch Poker, Poker Source and a number of others are all showing up where they used to in the search engine results. However, a number of the blogs, such as Bill Rini, have not yet returned to normal. I’m not sure if those blogs are going to return soon or not.

In addition to ranking for their names again, the site are also ranking for their “typical” keywords. For instance, Compatible Poker is once again ranking highly for mac poker.

It’s good to see the Google craziness come to an end (for now). Now all those affiliates can get back to business.

I don’t see anything on the KGC website, but iGamingNews is reporting that Russ Hamilton is being named in an interim KGC report.  A number of news sources including Poker King and CardPlayer have picked up the story and republished about it, so I am assuming they did some checking to make sure that iGamingNews was correct.  The original story claims that Russ and others scammed UltimateBet players out of over $60 million dollars and that UB has, thus far, paid back $6.1 million.  However, iGamingNews edited the story to say that it was actually an error and that $60 million was not correct, but they didn’t provide a corrected number.  They do say that there are additional refunds coming (no later than November 3rd, so about a month), so obviously the total amount stolen by Russ & Co was over $6.1 million.

It is important to emphasize that Russ Hamilton is not the only individual involved (obviously), according to the iGamingNews story.  It’s said that other names will be released.  I have a bunch of guesses about some other names, but I guess I shouldn’t name people speculatively on here.  There is a report from Frank Catania due sometime in November and the KGC is supposedly going to attempt to prosecute the cheaters.  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it would be nice to see some people actually help accountable.

The other bit of news is that UB was fined $1.5 million and given a zero tolerance policy on its KGC gaming license.  Any more violations or lack of cooperation will, supposedly, lead to UB losing its license.

Source: iGamingNews article

PS – At least I was shown to be correct.  I’m glad that the UB employees I talked to didn’t set me up to look like an idiot and completely frame Russ.  Because then I would feel really bad.

PPS – Russ lied to Barry and Joe re: the PokerRoad interview.  What did he really think he was going to accomplish by doing that?  Just to put off the inevitable or hope that he could keep his name out of it?  Seems pretty silly and hail mary-ish.

EDIT: Here is the report… KGC Report

I flew into Aruba late last night and got into the hotel around midnight.  My flight from Miami was myself, Roothlus, Cooler King, his wife (I didn’t catch her online name), Shawn Rice, dhubermex and a lot of other people who were obviously poker players, but I didn’t recognize them.

I just woke up around an hour ago and I looked out the window.  Wow.  This place is sick.  The location is 100x better than Atlantis in my opinion.  I just snapped this picture off my hotel balcony:

Amazing view. I can’t wait to go parasailing.  Now I am just waiting around for an hour or two for stevesbets to show up.

Have a good Sunday.

Yea, those three don’t necessarily go together.

Anyway, I went to get Picasa because I like how it handles picture resizing. I searched for Picasa (because it’s faster than typing in a URL and this is what I got):

Pretty normal. The first link (the “Download” link) was, obviously, my main interest. So I click on it. What do I go to? This URL: http://picasa.google.com/download/thanks.html. It looks like this:

Seriously Google? One of your major properties is displaying 404 links on your own search engines sitelinks? How is that possible? And what’s with the uber old school Google 404 error page? I think that logo is circa 1998 or something. Probably made in a Stanford computer lab computer by Larry Page in MSPaint. I can’t believe that Google doesn’t have both a) a more advanced algorithm for detecting sitelinks and b) someone checking on this stuff somewhere in their QA department.

Anyway, the reason I was looking for Picasa, as I said, was for photo resizing. Over the last few days, I had some air conditioning units put into my Costa Rica condo. The rainy season is coming to an end pretty soon and once it’s the dry season, it’ll be pretty nice to have AC. I was going to send a few pics to my family via email, but now that I’m blogging about it, here’s the partial install sequence for one of the units:

Pretty sweet.

I’ve been seeing this on and off for a really long time. I’m not sure what triggers this to show up, but I do know that it’s rare. Somehow, a Google search for Steve Beshear is now showing three Google Blog Search results, one of which (awesomely) is mine.

It’s definitely a quick way to get to page one for a hot topic, although I’m not sure yet how many clicks I’ll actually get from it. Here’s a link to the actual post in case you missed it: Steve Beshear is a hypocritical douchebag.

Thanks to stevebets reminding me about tonight’s Woot Off, I am the proud new owner of one of these:

(In case you can’t tell, it’s a toilet paper dispenser with a radio built-in)

To be fair, this purchase wasn’t 100% retarded. For whatever reason, the master bath in my condo didn’t come with a toilet paper dispenser, so I’ve been freerolling (I guess a different meaning of the term freeroll) it for the last 6 months. It’ll be good to finally have some sort of stability in my toilet paper roll location. And some music.