Recently, I learned of an email that a poker-playing acquaintance’s father received. It was a recommendation to check out “an excellent poker website”: pokerfuse. It is always nice to hear we are reaching people outside our close-knit community, but the complement was only part of a bigger message that I found rather disheartening. The email was a warning alerting the father to the Macedo/Qureshi scandal as “one of the dangers of on-line poker.”
Online poker struggles to represent itself as a legitimate skill game. Despite the efforts of advocacy groups, lobbyists and grass-roots movements, we are looked at with suspicion by many legislators and those outside the poker community: a dark unlawful Wild West, with secret off-shore sites with faulty RNGs, superusers, collusion and scams.
It’s hard to argue they are wrong.
So for this reason, every poker player – professional or recreational, whether a direct victim of the scam or not – has the right to be furious at the way certain high stakes players have acted. Beyond the immediate monetary loss for those cheated, there is the less tangible but very real cost to the poker game itself: another knock to our continuing attempts at legitimacy, further erosion of online poker’s reputability.
This is not a PR problem, and hiding the facts will not resolve it. This is a very real issue, and only exposing the guilty minority can we hope to shed the negative image.
As much as it pains certain parties to admit it, the collective mass that makes up the wider poker community played an instrumental role in uncovering the current scandal. They should be thanked and encouraged, not chastised and silenced. It was the persistence of the posters on 2+2’s “News, Views and Gossip” forum, commonly referred to as the rather derogatory “NVGtards,” who uncovered much of the story of Girah, pieced together the posts and chat logs, dug back into the purported history, and rightly questioned many for their involvement in the scandal.
It was an anonymous poster who first raised questions when Girah illegitimately won the BLUFF Challenge on Lock Poker: Initially posting on 2+2, “WouldYouWakeUp?” questioned the last-minute match for nearly $100k at a high stakes HU session with the unknown “SamChauhan” account. But the poster was silenced; the thread was removed from 2+2 with no reason given. Lock Poker advertises extensively on 2+2, paying the site thousands a month for the privilege of having a sponsored support forum and official customer service representatives.
So the poster took his accusations to “DonkDown,” a forum that exists on the fringes of the poker community known for its outspoken administrator “Dan Druff” and a laissez-faire attitude to moderation. There, the thread garnered significant views from the forum goers; but without the attention of the wider poker community, it never received the attention it deserved. Even the mention of DonkDown is restricted on 2+2: automated word filters alter any reference to the donkdown.com domain name.
And as it turned out, the accusations were dead on the mark. Despite Lock Poker auditing Jose Macedo’s account soon after he won the challenge, and subsequently disqualifying him over a separate issue – a different IP address was detected as playing on his account – they failed to detect the $100k chip dump. But doubt resurfaced in the wake of Macedo’s original hole-card sharing scam, and Haseeb Qureshi – having already admitted to being responsible for playing on his account – came clean about the chip dump.
If the original thread had not been deleted from 2+2, the increased scrutiny may have brought the truth to light before Macedo had a chance to cheat his fellow players out of over $30k.
Certainly, the posting process in NVG is far from optimal. When information is limited and restricted, nets are cast wide and, as a result, suspicion can fall far from the mark. At times, mob mentality can temporarily throw developing threads down dead ends. Indignant comments can reach hyperbolic heights, and a low signal-to-noise ratio makes following branching investigations difficult. It’s an inherent trait with a sprawling, nameless mass of posters, many of whom have their own concerns or agendas. But without this vital group working anonymously, many scandals, past and present, would not have had the attention they deserve.
Like it or not, if you are a sponsored pro for a poker site, you are a representative for poker. If you make videos for a poker training site, publicly advertise coaching services (say, charging $500/hour whilst you perform aerobic exercise), write long blog posts about prop bets, or you post and opine under a high stakes poker name, then you have a responsibility to the wider poker playing community not to bring disrepute to the game.
And if you are a poker room that hires sponsored pros to represent your site, pays players to make videos for your poker training site, or you represent professionals at your agency, you have a responsibility to verify the veracity of your employees reported winnings. Not just to protect your own brand, but to protect the brand that is online poker.
And if you use your good name to vouch for a player, to give the impression to they are the “real deal,” to a community that may pay hundreds or thousands to hire the player as a coach, or pay to watch their videos, or play on a site that has sponsored them, then you should do due diligence and check to the best of your ability that they are who you say they are.
And if you are one of these entities that discovers your employee, prodigy, or horse has lied, misrepresented themselves, or committed fraud, it is your responsibility not to hide the truth but to open up: come clean so the community can unite to condemn such activity; to show that this activity is not acceptable. Players must not be allowed to hide behind their screen name.
If the game of poker wants to shake off many of the preconceptions held by the public at large, these scandals – often very real and serious crimes – need to be brought into the limelight and universally criticized. Those guilty should be held responsible, as should the companies that choose to endorse and promote them.
So thanks should go out to the anonymous NVGtards for their extensive and diligent work; without them, there could be one more scammer still on the job, a poker training site still hiring a player guilty of multi-accounting, and a poker playing community still watching videos from someone who is not who he says he is.
Correction Aug 18: Clarified the word filtering for donkdown used on 2+2 poker forums; before it implied that the word “donkdown” itself was prohibited, but it’s only the domain itself that is filtered.
