Scott Tom Poker

1. Scott Tom Poker Player
2. Scott Tom Absolute Poker

Oct 09, 2017 Absolute Poker co-founder Scott Tom has returned to his home in Antigua after serving a week in a United States jail on illegal gambling charges.

1. Absolute Poker founder Scott Tom only had to serve seven days in jail and pay a $300,000 for online poker-related crimes and is now back home in Antigua.
2. Absolute Poker’s Scott Tom Released from US Custody, Returns to Antigua 9th October 2017 // Industry, Legal News, Misc, News. Former Absolute Poker president Scott Tom has been released from US custody following his sentencing hearing in New York and has returned to Antigua, according to news reports.

Former Absolute Poker president Scott Tom has been released from US custody following his sentencing hearing in New York and has returned to Antigua, according to news reports. Tom was sentenced last Monday in the US federal courtroom of Judge Barbara C. Moses, being the 10th of 11th individual defendants in 2011’s high-profile “Black Friday” case to answer to United States authorities.

Tom’s release and return to Antigua was first reported overnight at CalvinAyre.com. A piece by CA’s Steven Stradbrooke offers the first report on Tom’s sentencing, via information provided through Tom’s attorney, prominent Las Vegas-based gambling lawyer James Henderson.

According to that report, Judge Moses “went a bit rogue” by sentencing Tom to seven days in jail, a slight deviation from the time-served request offered by defense attorney Henderson. Henderson argued for that time-served sentence by serving up purportedly similar gambling cases in which the defendants had received probation or minor sentences for relatively minor roles in the offshore but US-facing gambling industry.

The unspoken elephant amid the proceedings, however, was Scott Tom’s very prominent role as the founder and president of Absolute Poker, which fled into the night in 2011 owing players at least $30 million in unrefunded deposits. That’s in addition to Scott Tom’s own role as the central cheater in the Absolute Poker “God Mode” cheating scandal, for which he has never answered to justice.

Tom’s sentence in the Black Friday case was also due to a plea deal that saw most of the felony charges dismissed. Scott Tom actually pled guilty to just a single count of accessory after the fact to the transmission of gambling information, which was a laughable minimization of Tom’s prominent role at AP. Tom kept his own name off of most of the payment-processing trail, instead leaving his step-brother, Brent Beckley, to take a larger hit for those crimes, including a brief stint in a Colorado federal prison.

Scott Tom also paid a relatively paltry fine of $300,000, plus some administrative fees.

In his plea deal, Tom had already accepted that he would be removed from the US at some point following his sentencing. Tom traded in his US citizenship long ago for the buy-a-passport program of St. Kitts and Nevis, which he testified to as his country of citizenship in a pre-sentencing hearing. Tom may also possess citizenship in Antigua and Barbuda, where he operates a high-profile party boat anchored in an Antiguan harbor that caters to upscale clientele.

Tom’s removal to Antigua means that he was sentenced to “non-custodial” probation last week, as opposed to the custodial version which would have required him to remain in the US for a year. Tom apparently displayed one last bit of judicial chutzpah, however: The CalvinAyre update reports that he was so sure of being released immediately that he’d purchased a return-flight ticket to Antigua for September 30th.

Judge Moses’ implementation of a seven-day sentence spoiled those plans, however. According to Tom’s attorney, Henderson, Moses referred to Tom buying that ticket as a “bold move,” and rendered it useless by implementing the sentence. (For karma’s sake, one hopes it was a non-refundable ticket.) Judge Moses was alleged unconvinced that Tom’s bref processing through the jail system as he was arraigned — he was immediately released on pre-negotiated bail — represented any real sense of “time served.”

Tom’s effective deportation to Antigua likely ends his saga in the online-gambling world, though with relatively free rein and plenty of income and assets squirreled away, one can never be sure. The conclusion of Tom’s case leaves only PokerStars’ original co-founder Isai Scheinberg as a defendant in the Black Friday case. However, there appears to be no real effort by US authorities to pursue the Scheinberg matter. There’s a night-and-day contrast between the vilified Tom and the widely-respected Scheinberg, and in fact, the tens of millions used to refund AP’s abandoned players came from the massive settlement negotiated by Scheinberg’s Rational Group to settle the PokerStars portion of the case.

COMMENTS

Leave a Comment

LATEST NEWS

filter by

Dan Katz

Is the Coronavirus a Threat to the 2020 WSOP?

This has been one hell of a week. The coronavirus (COVID-19) is picking up steam globally. World financial markets have...

Dan Katz

Side Bets Available at PokerStars Poker Tables

Poker is gambling. We like to say that it is a game of skill – and it is – but it is also gambling. And that’s...

Dan Katz

World Series of Poker Expands Online Bracelet Schedule to 14 Events

On Thursday, the World Series of Poker released the schedule for this summer’s online bracelet events, to be hosted...

Dan Katz

Phil Galfond Down €750,000 to VeniVidi1993 in Galfond Challenge

Look, I don’t typically make a habit of feeling bad when people of means lose money, but oh man, I am starting to get...

Dan Katz

PokerStars, partypoker Launching Dueling Bounty Tourney Series on Super Bowl Sunday

The year 2020 is already one-twelfth gone. It seems like just yesterday that Larry David was arguing that it was too...

Haley Hintze

Coronavirus Outbreak Forces Postponement of Triton Jeju Series

The Triton Super High Roller Series scheduled for mid-Februry in Jeju, South Korea has become the first poker event...

TOP POKER SITES

• PokerStars
• $600

• 888 Poker
• $400

• William Hill
• £1,200

• Betsafe Poker
• $1,000

• Bet-at-Home
• €1,500

• Guts Poker
• $/€/£300

view all

POKER IN YOUR COUNTRY

• US POKER SITES
• CANADIAN POKER SITES
• UK POKER SITES
• EUROPEAN POKER SITES
• SOUTH AFRICAN POKER SITES

DEVICE COMPATIBILITY

Mobile Poker Sites

Linux Poker

Android Poker Sites

Mac Poker

GUIDES

Deposit Methods

Poker Networks

SPORTS BETTING GUIDE

One of the biggest stories in the poker world over the past few weeks has been Ben Mezrich’s new book Straight Flush. Mezrich, who’s famous for writing The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, took an in-depth look at the rise and fall of Absolute Poker in his latest work. But many poker players don’t believe that Straight Flush does an adequate job of explaining the corruption involved with Absolute.

The famed author largely disagrees with this notion and defended the angle he took with his poker book in an interview with CalvinAyre.com. When asked about TwoPlusTwo forum members bashing how he allegedly skipped over a major cheating incident at Absolute Poker, Mezrich explained the situation with the following:

There’s a group of people who feel that Scott (Tom) is very evil and that the founders of AP are horrible and cheats. And I think the book is a works-in-all tale, although they would disagree. But I think the cheating scandal’s in there, there’s no cover-up, there’s no defense. It tells the story in their words. It’s certainly from their point of view. But I think the rise and fall of AP is told well in this story, and certainly what happened with the UIGEA and what happened with the industry, which I think is what’s important in this story.

Ben Mezrich went on to show some sympathy for those who’d lost money due to the scandal and said that he gets why the book is controversial. However, writing a book completely about the cheating scandal isn’t what he wanted to do. Instead, Mezrich wanted to focus on the rise and fall of Absolute Poker along with how unjust the UIGEA was.

Scott Tom Poker Player

The author’s recent interview with CalvinAyre is still unlikely to win Mezrich any points with hardcore poker enthusiasts, some of whom lost money when Absolute went offline following Black Friday. However, he does do a good job of defending his position, which has always been writing entertaining, glamorized stories about young college students who build financial empires, only to experience struggles and controversy along the way.

Scott Tom Absolute Poker

This formula has helped Mezrich’s books be spun into two huge movies in The Social Network (Accidental Billionaires) and 21 (Bringing Down the House). And as he contends in the CalvinAyre interview, it won’t be long before Straight Flush is turned into a major film.