If you haven’t heard about it Joe Sebok just inked a deal with Ultimate Bet. You may have read some of my previous posts about the non-sense that was taking place over there a few years back with all of the cheating scandals. I don’t want to get into the gory details as most of you are already aware of what happened. I read the article Joe was featured on in Bluff Magazine and it was very insightful.  From my perspective this is an extremely important step that Ultimate Bet had to make. Their reputation was in the mud and they had either let go of or lost a lot of pros with all of the drama and doubt from the cheating scandal. I said a while back that until they actually admitted they were wrong and made some serious management changes nothing would change.

Well sure enough Joe Sebok is now “Media and Operations Consultant” for the “new” Ultimate Bet online poker room. When I first heard about this I questioned Seboks’ sanity. However, after reading Seboks’ reasoning I have to commend him for this move. Sebok is in a can’t lose scenario. If UB fails everyone will say it was going to fold anyway because the cheating scandal was just too much. If UB succeeds Sebok is hailed as a hero (rightly so). I say that with the belief that Joe Sebok is serious about this enough to put his name on the product. To me that means he is going to do everything in his power to make the changes necessary and bring credibility back to the site.

Sebok indicated that he has visited the UB offices in Costa Rica and spoken with the operations staff and security face to face. That has got to be a good thing. He also has a few things that he wants to get accomplished while in this post. I won’t give away the entire article but it is certainly worth a read.

True, he won’t be able to win over everyone and that is understandable. However, if he can find a way to turn around the debacle that was UB just a few years ago he will have made one of the smartest business decisions of his young life.

Good luck Joe.