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Thread: Flashback: Nolan Dalla criticizes my "60 Minutes" final statement in 2008

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Flashback: Nolan Dalla criticizes my "60 Minutes" final statement in 2008

    Interesting to look at this from a 2014 perspective.

    In 2008, I appeared on "60 Minutes" to discuss the AP and UB scandals. As is common for all TV news magazines, they recorded a long interview and edited it way down. Near the end of the interview, I made two important statements:

    1) The AP and UB scandals may not be an isolated incident. Perhaps other sites are cheating us, and we don't realize it yet.

    2) Legalization, licensing, and regulation is the key to stopping these insider cheating scandals.

    Unfortunately, they cut statement #2, and chose to end it with #1, likely because it made for better shock value.

    This caused a lot of online poker players and employees to get angry at me, and I got brutalized on 2+2 and various blogs about it. I was annoyed at 60 Minutes for editing out what I felt to be the most important statement, so much that in a subsequent interview with CNBC, I made sure they would include a pro-legalization statement (which they did).

    Here is Dalla's commentary about me in November 2008, shortly after the 60 Minutes piece aired:

    http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/no...heaters-part-3

    The segment finally concludes with a devastating swan song, crooned by Todd Witteles, who was interviewed earlier. If anyone thought the program was reasonably accurate and balanced up to that point, or if anyone believed that the story wasn't going to be as bad as originally feared, Witteles' final devastating sonata was about as appealing as the sound of Yoko Ono's voice to rock fans.

    Witteles' comments ended up being the most memorable quote of the entire story. Unfortunately, they were what most viewers will have taken away from the segment.

    Witteles said, "The people who did this were very greedy and very blatant. But the scary thing is - there may be other accounts out there like this, even on other sites that are not being done with the same sense of recklessness, and maybe this has been going on at more than Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Maybe it's going on at several other places and maybe it's still going on at these sites."

    Witteles' comments were not only outrageous, they were reprehensible. While anything is certainly possible, to leave millions of viewers hanging now with serious questions about an entire industry, that other sites might possibly be corrupt - without any shred of credible evidence to support this accusation - is beyond ignorant.

    No doubt officials at Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and other top online poker sites must have been screaming at their television screens when they heard that comment. The implication that these entirely legitimate businesses are now doing the same things that rogue employees at two other sites have done was not only unfounded - it was slanderous.

    It was an insult to the ownership, management and many hardworking employees entrusted with online security at these companies to be thrown into the same dung pile with the creeps who stole millions of dollars at Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet.


    Witteles should have known better than to say what he said. And 60 Minutes should have shown greater balance by cutting out those unwarranted and very damaging remarks. He had already made his point once earlier in the show. It was not necessary to leave millions of viewers with the impression that all of the online poker operators are crooks.
    At the time, I defended myself by saying that indeed, we don't know what Stars and Full Tilt are doing, because they answer to nobody, and are not regulated by any kind of reputable government body.

    I was mocked and laughed at for such an opinion, for daring to insult the pillars of the community involved with Pokerstars and Full Tilt.

    Admittedly, I knew nothing of the embezzlement of player funds at Full Tilt at the time, but that's exactly what I was trying to say. None of us knew. None of us knew if Full Tilt and Pokerstars were as legit as they appeared to be on the surface, because we couldn't dig deeper than the surface itself. As it turned out, Full Tilt was indeed crooked, and had been stealing our money for a long time.

    Pretty amazing how delusional some people were at the time, assuming that the large poker sites could be fully trusted simply because they claimed to be trustworthy.

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    Diamond chinamaniac's Avatar
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    add lock poker to the list of crooked sites

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    Diamond Hockey Guy's Avatar
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    Why didn't you leave a comment on his blog defending yourself & telling him that the part about regulation & legalization got cut?
    (•_•) ..
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hockey Guy
    I'd say good luck in the freeroll but I'm pretty sure you'll go on a bender to self-sabotage yourself & miss it completely or use it as the excuse of why you didn't cash.

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hockey Guy View Post
    Why didn't you leave a comment on his blog defending yourself & telling him that the part about regulation & legalization got cut?
    Honestly I didn't find the blog until years later, so there was no point.

    There were so many similar blogs out there bashing me for essentially the same thing, I basically stopped reading them.

    Can you imagine how much they would have laughed at me in 2008 if I said, "I bet it's possible that Full Tilt doesn't even really have your money in the bank."

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    One Percenter Pooh's Avatar
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    Why don't you demand an apology from him?

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    Poker Investigative Journalist
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Hockey Guy View Post
    Why didn't you leave a comment on his blog defending yourself & telling him that the part about regulation & legalization got cut?
    Honestly I didn't find the blog until years later, so there was no point.

    There were so many similar blogs out there bashing me for essentially the same thing, I basically stopped reading them.

    Can you imagine how much they would have laughed at me in 2008 if I said, "I bet it's possible that Full Tilt doesn't even really have your money in the bank."
    In 2008 they probably did have your money in the bank, but when they started having serious processor problems in 2009 is when I believe they knew that time was running short and they'd better grab while the grabbin' was good.

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by haleylh View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post

    Honestly I didn't find the blog until years later, so there was no point.

    There were so many similar blogs out there bashing me for essentially the same thing, I basically stopped reading them.

    Can you imagine how much they would have laughed at me in 2008 if I said, "I bet it's possible that Full Tilt doesn't even really have your money in the bank."
    In 2008 they probably did have your money in the bank, but when they started having serious processor problems in 2009 is when I believe they knew that time was running short and they'd better grab while the grabbin' was good.
    Very possible, but my statement was still true and correct, in that the sites were not being regulated by anyone or anything of authority, and could basically steal or cheat to their heart's content without anyone being aware.

    At the time, Dalla and others attacked me for suggesting that such horrible, awful things were possible at such honest, salt-of-the-earth companies like Stars and Full Tilt. Companies that we could obviously trust despite zero meaningful regulation and hundreds of millions of dollars of our money at stake.

    Just amazed me how many otherwise intelligent people were in the camp of, "You can trust this company even though there's a ton of money involved and nobody regulating them." I was seen as a paranoid conspiracy theorist by suggesting that AP/UB might just be one of many scandals we would come to realize in the coming years.

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pooh View Post
    Why don't you demand an apology from him?
    It's been 6 years since he wrote it. I don't need to demand an apology. I just thought it was pretty funny to read from today's standpoint, realizing how foolish people were for blindly trusting the big poker sites despite no regulation and operating illegally.

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    it irks the crap out of me how often the media twists a story. Taking away point #2 of your comments completely changes the whole meaning of what you were trying to convey. They should have either included both points or neither.

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