Iovation Granted Nevada Gaming License

The online poker community was recently stunned to discover that Greg Pierson, the co-founder of disgraced former poker site Ultimate Bet, and now the CEO of cyber security firm Iovation, has been granted a Class 2 license to offer his products in the state of Nevada.
Back in 2008, the Ultimate Bet scandal broke after Russ Hamilton and a number of other cheats used software written by Iovation to see the hole cards of their opponents, thus allowing them to fleece more than twenty millions dollars from their hapless victims. Although no evidence was ultimately found showing Pierson profiting directly from the scandal, there is, however, ample audio evidence of him and his partners formulating ways in which to payback as little money as possible from those Ultimate Bet customers who had been cheated.
According to a recent revealing interview with Gaming Intelligence, Pierson explains that the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC) went through all Iovation’s financial details going back a decade, and that in the end no evidence of any wrongdoing was found. Feeling vindicated, Pierson subsequently explained:
“My company wrote some software and that software was used to rob players. I wish that had not happened. I have had to talk about this nightmare so often that I have become kind of numb to it but hopefully it is now over.”
Nevertheless, Pierson’s initial application for a Nevada gaming license was apparently rejected, and over the past two years the company has had to spend $500,000 in order to have its application eventually approved. Needless to say, many in the poker industry are not at all pleased with the NGC’s decision. One such person is UB expert and TwoPlusTwo poster Haley ‘haley44’ Hintze, who expressing her feelings of betrayal on the online forum described Iovation’s unanimous approval by the board last Thursday as “insulting to all the people who worked to uncover the UB fraud and theft over the years.”