Poker News Daily can confirm that Pitbull Poker, a small site on the Flash Poker Network, closed down on Wednesday, according to a high-placed source. Contrary to rumors, no arrests were made in Costa Rica. The future of player funds held on the site is up in the air.
Dave Brenes, at last account, is the spokesperson for Pitbull Poker with the title of Network Manager. He had previously been in contact with Poker News Daily regarding the allegations and, when asked to do an interview about the matter, declined by saying a statement from ownership was coming. The source told Poker News Daily on Wednesday that the closure of the site caught them off-guard and a public statement would be forthcoming. Pitbull Poker tables should not be active online.
On September 29th, a user by the name of “dbreal” posted a message on the TwoPlusTwo forums claiming he was Brenes. Poker News Daily can independently confirm that “dbreal” is in fact Brenes. The post in question states that Kevin Baronowski (owner of Pitbull Poker) took away Brenes’s TwoPlusTwo account, thus he had to register a new one. He stated that fellow workers at Pitbull Poker called him at 3:00am stating that Kevin and Jordan (a business partner) were trying to take out computers and leave the premises without saying a word to anyone in the office. The on-site staff then called police, who took the two in for questioning.
Less than two hours after that post, the rumor gained a ton of steam when players reported that Pitbull Poker’s website was up and running; however, players logged into the client only to be met with the site being down. Players attempting to log in received the following error:
Application Error
An unexpected error has occurred! Our support team has been already informed. See details below.
Message: com.draagon.util.ResourceException: com.draagon.meta.MetaException: Unable to load objects of class [draagon::user::User]
PokerScout.com, a popular website that tracks the number of players online, reported a zero for Pitbull poker early this morning. The games and poker site were down for over eight hours following the post from “dbreal” on the forums.
Twelve hours after his original post, “dbreal” surfaced again in the same thread on the TwoPlusTwo forums. He wrote that Baronowski was taken in for interrogation, as many people on-scene claimed he was trying to leave without notice. He stated once again that he was not personally there when they were caught, but confirmed that his computer was one of the first they took away before co-workers arrived at the scene.
There are now allegations from Pitbull regulars (mainly former prop players monitoring the cheating situation) that they have been monitoring activity the last few months on the site and have exposed at least three superuser accounts.
Poker News Daily will continue to monitor the situation closely as it unfolds.