If you haven’t been watching poker since it came out of ESPN, make a cup because the tea has been served hot for the past two weeks. We will do our best to fix everything here.
Cheating has been a big issue in the poker community for the past two weeks, with many players banned from the GGPoker online site being kicked out. That included some of the biggest names like Ali Imsirovic, who just won two high roller tournaments at the Las Vegas Aria last week. He was accused by his professional partner Alex Foxen of multiple cases of cheating both online and in live tournaments.
This led to a few tweets from a player named Martin Zamani, who was part of the stable of Bryn Kenney, the No. 1 winner in the history of poker tournaments with more than $ 57 million in career winnings.
Since we are in the middle of yelling at cheaters @BrynKenney and all his horses are basically forced to collude with GG esp in satties. “Do the best for the team” didn’t let me play GG 5k plo events on my own, but at the party I could play 10K if the ghost of the horse were.
– Martin Zamani (@martin_zamani) April 21, 2022
Zamani went to Doug Polk’s podcast to discuss his allegations in more detail, as he grabbed countless tears from a vape pen and offered to eat an entire bag of mushrooms. It’s an interview you have to watch to believe it, and later we’ll get to the part about frog poison and eye acid.
If you feel less like playing poker, a “stable” is what it looks like: the next players compete with someone else who puts in the money, and the profits are shared to help share the risk and the inevitable variation that comes with both effective. games and tournaments. Players supported by the same person or union are considered part of the same stable.
What is alleged is that Kenney’s players at GG Poker, for which he acted as an agent and received a portion of the “rake” paid by players to participate in a tournament, violated the terms of service of multiple ways that are also very unethical. Stable players shared their cards with each other while playing in the same high-stakes tournaments. Recruited “soft” players (“whales” or “VIPs” who are rich outside of poker, but not big players) were tricked and deceived because the stable worked together rather than independently during the hands.
And then, when stable players entered a tournament, a more experienced and better player would take control of the account and end the event, often using “real-time assistance” software that is not allowed.
Real-time assistance, or “RTA” for short, makes online poker basically impossible to defeat because the perfect mathematical decision is given to a player while he is in hand. It’s the equivalent of having a chess computer sitting next to you while you play, except that in chess the computer always wins.
Because poker continues to play and the turn of a card can change everything, the computer will not win every time. But you win more than you lose, because while poker is an imperfect game of information (you probably know the scope of your opponents’ holes, but you don’t know exactly what they have), the machine finally defeats the man in any case. large sample type.
One such “VIP” player is Lauren Roberts, who was close to Kenney personally, but has now also filed complaints against him.
The texts I shared were a recent discussion with Bryn telling me I owe her money and me asking for accounting. Notice how the number keeps changing, he wrote it in the book, but then there was no book, he keeps track of 1000 people, no spreadsheet, he is never wrong.
– Lauren Roberts (@PlayPokerLkAMan) April 23, 2022
Then it becomes abusive, it is pathological. When he said he was no longer playing, he proposed a new scheme to me, he sent me a “free” before the last streak of losses in 2019, he told me he would give it to me. I 1/2 of Sergei’s involvement to fund the play because I needed him to play.
– Lauren Roberts (@PlayPokerLkAMan) April 23, 2022
If the allegations are true, and so far there have been very few rejections from anyone, it seems that if you play online poker with high stakes, there is a good chance that you will be competing against computers as much as people.
Kenney chose to defend himself through a live interview with his friend Sarah Herring on PokerNews, but his response seems to have been almost certainly rejected by most fans and players as fake. Herring wasn’t exactly Mike Wallace in his 60 minutes with his questions, and she admitted before she started that it was unlikely to happen.
It wasn’t the best time for Kenney to try to make a splash, although poker theory says that’s what you should do when you’re at the bottom of your rank. But basically everyone has called it quits, and it’s unlikely we’ll see Kenney, a former major piece of GGPoker’s rise, as the face of anything in the game in the future.
Through the daily podcast Solve For Why, you’ll find a pretty good summary of how most poker players feel about the whole mess, as well as the pitfalls in high-stakes overall. S4Y offers poker training as well as some industry-wide coverage, and its new podcast format has benefited greatly from all this controversy that hit the game at the same time.
Yes, we will now get the frog poison and eye acid.
In addition to advocating for things like yoga and veganism in his stable, Zamani claims that Kenney ordered him to visit a shaman, who then asked him to pour frog poison on his arm in a ritual known as Kambo. When Zamani refused, he promised that he might have spilled acid in his eyes.
If an hour of smoking talking about TeamViewer and VPN and how much he hated his roommates is too much, we understand. But don’t miss this clip from the interview where Zamani talks about his interaction with the shaman. He is much more entertaining than Chris Moneymaker bluffing Sammy Farha in 2003.
Kenney acknowledged that part of this was true in his PokerNews interview here, and it seems as if Zamani has no reason to lie. So yes, it is possible that the number 1 winner of all time in tournament poker looks more like an aspiring cult leader than a financial sponsor.
And just like the next hand, the next piece of gossip or poker scandal is usually a few moments away. So grab some chips and a chair, maybe we’ll be here for a while.
