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Annie Duke’s Interview on PocketFives Podcast 7-3-08
Annie Duke Interview With Pocketfives Podcast(Interview starts about 4:25 minutes in)
P5s – 
Annie welcome to the PocketFives broadcast
Annie
– Thank you, I think it’s my second time
P5s – 
That’s right, we had you on in late 2006 I believe it was
Annie
– Yup That’s Right, That’s Right.
Question #1
P5s – 
Well first we’d like to go over your current UB tournament schedule. Where does itstand now and what feedback have you gotten from PocketFivers?
Annie
– Well I mean I think that on the whole people are very positive on the changes.It’s definitely an ever-changing schedule and this week we’ve completely revamped thesatellite schedule based on actually suggestions from PocketFives. Basically you knowthat the way that I’ve sort of taken the approach is that this schedule is for the people who play it, it’s not for me. So I’m gonna do the best I can to listen to the people who areactually playing on the site and playing the schedule, about what they want. And that’swhy I use PocketFives as such a resource, so you know the schedule has changed a lot based on input I have gotten from the site. And That’s really one of the main places I gofor input, aside from Pros that are associated with UltimateBet itself. You know right nowit’s definitely still changing. It’s relatively gelled at this moment. There are minor tweeksthat happen, we’re gonna be adding in tournaments for the Four, Five, and Six PM Hours,so that afternoon time doesn’t have a big hole in it, which it does now. Again taking a lotof suggestions on the satellites that have been coming this week. Thursday or Friday I’mgonna be sitting down and revamping that satellite schedule, I think on Thursday. Sohopefully that will start taking in effect next wee, but you know I am very greatful for thecommunity because I find it very helpful. You know I think that the one frustration that Ihave is when I do post questions on there, that people call it spam. Because you know,from my perspective it’s like look you know you as a community, this tournamentschedule is for you as a community so I like to A: Keep you informed about the changesthat are happening but also B: Really get input on the kind of things you would like to seeand I think that’s quite the opposite of spam, because I’m not just on there advertising.I’m actually trying to get things mutated in a sort of way that’s gonna make the most people happy, and you know I’ve actually put some polls up there and tried to find outexactly what people want by vote. I really take the input very seriously so it’s actually been a lot of fun. I don’t post at all on 2+2. I think that the high profile players have beenvery attacked on there and I’ve personally had a lot of really awful attacks that were personal enough that it felt like honestly they should have been removed from the site.And the thing is that I’m willing to take an invade-iv criticism, I don’t have a problemwith that. It’s when the attacks become very personal that I go away. It’s when peoplestart talking about like whether my ass is fat, or whether I smell, or just stupid stuff likethat. That’s really kind of high school, or when the attacks get really, really nasty or aboutyou know, people who are related to me or things like that, and that happens over on 2+2without anybody seeming to watch it. The thing is that, and you know, the policy of PocketFives seems to be like negative comments are completely fine, which I agree with,
 
 but personal attacks are not ok. And then because I feel like that’s freedom of speechright? So I’ve taken a lot of negative hits on PocketFives but the upside for me, of youknow, being able to interact with the community that I’m trying to service in my role, ismuch more for me than whatever negativity that I have to deal with. And I’m certainlywilling to take the negativity and the fact is people have a right to their opinions.
Question #2
P5s
– One of our active PocketFivers, three banger, wrote in the following question: Hesays: Annie, why would you lend your name to UB so quickly after they were exposedfor cheating their customers? Even if you were confident it won't happen again, how canthe average player know this with any certainty when the company initially reacted so poorly to the scandal?
Annie – 
I wanna know whether that person is talking about the AP issue or the UB issue.So let me address the UB issue to be fair since that is the site that I represent. And I wantto say off the bat, I’m willing to answer anything that I know about the scandal. I dowanna say very clearly that I’m not a spokesman for the scandal and I certainly didn’tconduct the investigation. See I am very curious as to why that people think that the brand reacted badly to the superuser scandal, because what I've seen is that somebodysaid, hey this account is kind-of out of range and then UB said well let's look at it. Thenthey took about a week and a half they went, oop, really bad guy, let’s go investigate it.And then they investigated it and they put out a couple of interim statements, and thenthey refunded everybody. They never denied it.When the management that screwed the AP issue up was in place I was looking toleave the brand, I was actively doing that, I was talking to other brands. Very quicklyafter that sort of got cleaned up the management changed. I was then told give thismanagement a chance. I was like, I don't know, I was still looking to leave the brand.Some people that I really trust were telling me to give these guys a chance, right? The bubblings of the NioNio thing start happening in January, at which the point the brandsaid there is an issue. This is now a different management in place, right? So the newmanagement handled that particular issue much differently than the old managementhandled the AP issue. And I sit here and I go wow well, look at how many accounts wereinvolved So first of all they have to catch all the accounts, that's going to take a littlewhile. But then after they catch all the accounts, they actually have to do a tremendousamount of datamining going back to March of '06 to discover basically every transactionthat was involved with that many accounts. That doesn't take a week, so I feel like thatthe people who are very negative about issue have sort of put the brand in a catch-22.Had the brand actually started refunding within, you know a week or two or whatever,there would have been huge mistakes with the refund because they wouldn't have caughteverybody and caught all the...because you know, it was a big datamine.
Question #3
P5s – 
Well before the new management team stepped in Annie, one of the big negativesabout UB had been its customer service or lack there of. Members repeatedly postedcomplaints about how e-mails went unanswered indefinitely. Now that there are new
 
 people in place in charge of UB, what type of response can a customer expect whensending an e-mail about anything from a technical issue to a cash out?
Annie
– If I had anything to do with customer service I would be able to answer thatquestion, but I don’t. So you know the only thing I can tell you is I noticed there aren’t alot of complaints about customer service anymore, so you know I think that it’s beingcleaned up. I mean I know some of the people who are involved with improving that particular part of the business and I certainly trust them. I think that the responsiveness inthat particular area of the company has gotten much better. I’ve certainly seen thecustomer service department and see how it operates, and how things are tracked. An youknow as far as I can tell that’s improving with the rest of the business, but I don’t track customer service and I don’t see reports on response times and things like that, so it’shard for me to answer that.
Question #4 
P5s
– And we’ve got a question from mu poker player, who is also a long time poster onthe forum and he asks: How do we know that UB ownership wasn't directly behind thescandal and that they just used some anonymous corrupt employee as a scapegoat? Howdo we know that UB really changed ownership and management?
Annie -
Let me answer the second thing first. It's a matter of public record that thatcompany changed ownership, because the company was held as a public company. Andthen obviously when UIGEA happened it could no longer be held as a public companyand listed on the London Stock exchange if it was US-facing. So it had to changeownership and obviously it was sold privately, so that's just a matter of record that it didactually change ownership.You can also check in terms of Paul Leggett, as to what his employmentconditions were. He was with another publicly traded gaming company until August of '06. In August of '06 which obviously is right when that AP thing broke, he was broughtin as a management consultant to start restructuring actually the IDS portion of thecompany, which is the customer service side, um, and data service side. So that was justas that happened, right? So then he said, oh my god, what's happening, I'm leaving the brand at which point the owners of the brand said, no we want you now to be the personwho manages the brand because we know that you're honest, cause you weren't with the brand beforehand and, you know, you're freaking out about this and we want actuallysomeone who is going to come in and clean up. So people can actually check PaulLeggett's employment records as well.Actually they didn't use an anonymous corrupt employee as a scapegoat in thecase of the UB scandal. Essentially what happened and these are answers that wereactually given to an investigative reporter. When UltimateBet was first formed, there wasa software company and there was a company that held the gaming license, ok? So thiswas really back in the day, right? Somebody associated with the company that held thegaming license basically developed a piece of software that if it were used, would allowyou to see the whole cards of other players. So again it wasn't a privilege account, Right?So you could create any account, like any account could as long as you had the piece of 
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