Video Interview with Michael Piper aka 'Wazz'. Michael is a professional poker player specialising in Pot Limit Omaha, and has recent NLHE tournament success including an EPT final table.
When you play live poker you can usually tell a lot about a player without even playing a hand with them. The way they look can be quite a reliable source of information. Well, the same is true with online play, you just need to look at their avatar.
Here are the top 5 types of avatar that will let you spot the fish at the tables.
Pocket Rockets
Why not show everyone how "into poker" you are by choosing some cheesy poker-related image as your avatar? Popular choices include pocket rockets, royal flush or a picture of some cartoon shark.
Yes, these fools are the same people that turn up to the casino to play 1/2 No Limit wearing some ridiculous "I'm all in" t-shirt. Most of these guys will be new to poker but those who aren't will not have improved since, or will be worse than, when they first ever played the game.
Will usually own at least 2 books by Phil Hellmuth and spend more time typing in the chatbox than playing hands.
Most likely to say:"I hate all these frickin donkeys, they make it impossible to win. I play better against people that know what they are doing, at least you can put them on a hand".
Douchebag
The douchebag pic is a favorite avatar of your typical egotistical, fake tanned, kissy faced douchebag. I mean, when you spend your whole entire day looking in the mirror it's the natural to chose a photo of yourself as your avatar. I wonder, do these guys really think that other poker players want to sit and look at a picture of some dude's face while they are playing? I guess they do! Right-click -> Block Image -> GTFO.
With an ego the size of the BP oil spill, these players have way too much confidence in their ability as poker players to ever feel the need to learn how to play better or take advice from anyone else. Every hand of poker for them is personal and they will try to outplay their opposition at every opportunity, generally spewing off large amounts of money in the process. Value-checking strong hands to these guy will make you rich.
Most likely to say:"ty" (straight after winning a hand)
Famous pro
When you suck at poker, why not trick people into thinking you know what you're doing by using an avatar of your favorite pro player. Phil Ivey or Stu Ungar seem to be the most popular choices.
These "poker enthusiasts" spend far too much time watching poker on TV and not enough time working on their own game. Word of advice guys, you're never going to get better at poker by watching Mike Matusow and Chris Ferguson play a donk-n-go on Poker After Dark. And just because you watched durrrr 3-bet 73s in a deepstacked TV cashgame it doesn't mean that you can do the same thing profitably with a 30bb stack in some turbo SNG.
Most likely to say: "I knew you hit the damn flush, I knew it. Nice chase donk." (after paying off a huge river bet)
Athene / Chiren80
This is another very accurate tell that a player is bad. Unfortunately these players are rarely found playing above the very micro-est of micro stakes offered on the site.
People with Athene avatars are all newbies to poker, struggling to learn how to play a game that doesn't involve running around a virtual world casting magic spells on hobgoblins and gnomes.
The Athene avatar player is almost always atrocious at poker but when their main influence and inspiration in poker isn't even a winning player himself how could they turn out to be anything other than terrible?
Most likely to say:"POOOOONED" (After hitting their 3-outer on the river).
Ugly Baby
What is it with people who have babies that think everyone else wants to see them? I couldn't care less that you have a baby and I certainly don't want to look at the wrinkly little bastard while I play poker. It's a pretty terrible idea to put photos of your young children on public display on the internet in the first place, but to put those photos up while you gamble away the nappy/diaper money is just lolridic. Not to mention that you're just asking for some wise ass to write "Hey, what breed of dog is that in your avatar?"
In my experience, baby-avatar donk is almost always a loose passive calling station. Typical full ring VPIP/PFR in the 37/9 range. When you have screaming kids to look after and stop you from sleeping you're never going to have the time or concentration to improve as a poker player. That is why the baby avatar is one of the most accurate online tells available, always a fish!
The poker tournament of the year was held tonight and you can see video highlights right here. No, I'm not talking about the WSOP main event, I'm talking about Daleroxxu's Hyper Turbo No Limit Omaha Hi/Lo Shoveament Freeroll of course. Not only was there much more thrilling action in my tournament but you won't have to listen to Normal Chad telling some garbage ex-wife jokes while watching the highlights.
Thanks to everyone who signed up at short notice and thanks to Steve and The PokerStars VIP Club for setting it up and adding to the prizepool, also at short notice. That was pretty awesome!
Everyone who played seemed to have enjoyed themselves thoroughly playing this so I think it's about time we saw some Hyper Turbo 45man SNGs running regularly on PokerStars. Not only NLHE but NLO and NLO H/L too (pot limit doesn't work in SNGs, not hard to figure out why). I believe these action filled games would be extremely popular with both recreational and pro players.
From the recreational players point of view, the chance to play and win a multi-table tournament in 15-20 minutes is very appealing, especially for those with busy lifes. From a pro player's perspective, the ability to play an insane volume of games while still having a good edge over the field is a no brainer.
If you agree please write a quick message to support@pokerstars.com from your stars registered email stating your support for Hyper Turbo Multi Table SNGs.
Sample email for lazy bastard poker players:
Dear Pokerstars
I would love nothing more than for you to start spreading Hyper Turbo 45man SNGs on your poker site. These games would encompass all the speed, fun and action that I look for in playing online poker, and I'm sure many of your customers would feel the same way.
As the new version of my blog is about to reach 100,000 hits, it is time for a celebration.
This Sunday PokerStars will be home to the "Daleroxxu's NLO H/L Hyper Shoveament Freeroll". A No Limit Omaha Hi/Lo tournament with very shallow stacks and extremely fast blind increases. The winner walks away with the $100 prize, with runners up prizes of $30 and $20 provided courtesy of The Pokerstars VIP Club.
And a bounty on Daleroxxu - A ticket for the Sunday quarter million. (If multiple people bust me, bounty will be awarded to the player with the most chips at the start of the hand, if equal - then decided by who lasts longest in the tournament)
The tournament takes place on PokerStars this Sunday, 15th August. 3pm Eastern, 8pm British. Tourney ID: 299717523
Blog comment, facebook comment, youtube message or tweet at me to let me know your Twitter/FB/Youtube usernames, plus your PokerStars ID and you will be credited with a ticket before the event starts.
Final date to do this is Friday morning (13th August 6am ET / 11am UK time). No exceptions. You must make sure to type your PokerStars ID exactly, with the correct case.
Video interview with Marty 'The Lipo Fund' Mathis (TheLipoFund on Stars and WISHIGOTFPPS on ftp).
In the interview Marty tells us how he built a roll up from nothing and has been traveling the world, meeting tons of other poker player and having fun.
I recently had the pleasure of interacting with PokerStars support team. Awesomenes ensued.
I sent an email to stars about a bug and they replied:
From: "PokerStars Support"
To: dale**********
Subject: Servizio Clienti PokerStars - Problemi di Visualizzazione
Hello Dale,
Thank you for your email **SNIP**
Kind Regards,
Vincent C
PokerStars Support Team
I noticed the subject was in Italian. Luckily I was able to translate it no problem - it's just english words with a bunch of i's and o's stuck on the end - but thought I'd have some fun with them.
I replied:
From: Dale**********
To: PokerStars Support
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your very detailed explanation, it was much appreciated.
It was interesting that you chose to write the subject of the email in
Italian, perhaps showing off your cunning linguistic skills. However it did
upset me a little because it reminded me that I can no longer play against
Italian players on PokerStars.com
I have written you a question in base64. Please feel free to respond in any
language that you chose.
I trust this email has answered you query and made you laugh.
If you require further assistance please contact us again.
Regards,
Giuseppe G
P♠kerStars Support Team
Translation:
Actually, I am not really confident to reply to your query because I believe that every single poker player would have his personal opinion, so I can suggest you to post the same query on some poker blog. I am sure that with all the response that you will get you will be able to come up with your own idea.
If you like, you can try to post your question on PokerStars blog and see what other customer think.
http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/
I replied:
From: Dale**********
To: PokerStars Support
Ciao Giuseppe,
It is daytime here in the UK therefore Dale is fast asleep, so if you do not
mind I will respond to your email, I am Dale's assistant.
However, I am a monkey and my grasp of the English language is unequivocally bad.
For that reason I will reply to your email using the method of flag semaphore.
Best Bananas,
Monkey
Translation:
Sorry but I want to know who is officially the best blogger in the world
They replied:
From: "PokerStars Support"
To: dale**********
Subject: Servizio Clienti PokerStars - The Best Poker Blogger
Hello Dale and Monkey ,
Thank you for your interesting email.
I am sorry if I am replying after so long time, but I have been off for a
few days.
After a research on internet I have probably found the answer to your query.
As I have already said in my last email, I believe that internet is a source
of many information, some are useful some useless. I have been googleing
and then after a while the answer pop-up to my attention, it was there, on
www.pokerstarsblog.com.
I will give to you the link where read the answer, it is written in the article.
I trust this email has answered you query and if you require further
assistance please contact us again.
Best Bananas,
Giuseppe G
P♠kerStars Support Team
Translation:
So epic! PokerStars support team are, by a mile, the very best in the online poker industry. They are always quick to reply and with a friendly, personal touch and many times in the past they have refunded buyins to me and my friends for situations where they weren't even at fault, such as internet disconnections / power outages. Icompare this to the time when I used to grind SNGs on the Tribeca network (now merged with ipoker), when THEIR servers would crash once every 48 hours and I'd have to send 5 emails begging to get my buyins refunded - eventually after a week if I was lucky. What a contrast.
Even when I think of other industries where I, as a customer, have had to deal with a company's customer service department, the experience is never pleasurable. It usually ends up with me being put on hold for a very long time followed by a conversation with someone in Bangalore who I can't understand a word of, and who doesn't understand me either (Seriously I had to spell out the word GLASGOW to a girl from ebookers.com). That crap puts me on life tilt for the rest of the day.
It seems that Cake Poker (Doyles Room etc.) are using the crappy, easy to hack, XOR encryption method between client and server rather than something that is actually secure such as SSL.
This means that any 13 year old with some knowledge of computers and a script could easily decrypt this data and view sensitive information such as hole cards and login/password. They just have to be somewhere between your computer and Cake's servers, most likely the same wireless network, but also people working for ISPs and people working for Cake could be snooping too.
This is the same drama that was brought up relating to UB / Absolute not so long ago, which has since been fixed (eventually).
If you are a user of ANY Cake skin do NOT play on the site until they fix this mess!
Again, all the work on exposing this was done by Poker Table Ratings.
It was mention in a previous blog entry that PokerStars Team PRO player Chiren80 (Bachir Boumaaza) had exploited a PokerStars promotion to effectively steal money from the company that he was representing.
Since then, Steve D from PokerStars VIP has issued the following statement:
PokerStars has performed an investigation into heads-up play between PokerStars Team Online member ‘Chiren80’ and the player ‘3J55’ on July 13th and 14th, 2010. PokerStars does not usually comment in public on the results of investigations of this type. However, in this case, PokerStars has obtained the permission of both parties involved to post the results of the investigation and the consequences for the players involved.
These players were not technically flipping during their heads-up play, but their play was functionally similar. Their goal was not to play poker but to exploit the PokerStars Micromania promotion to earn more value in VPPs and FPPs than they were paying in rake. This play was a violation of the Terms and Conditions of the PokerStars VIP Club, specifically rule 11: ‘Any abuse of the program or failure to follow program rules may result in the termination of membership and forfeiture of all accrued VPPs and FPPs’. These terms and conditions can be found on the PokerStars website: http://www.pokerstars.com/vip/terms/
These players do also have some history of playing together on the same table in hands with more than two players dealt in. PokerStars game security has reviewed their play in such situations and has found no evidence of collusion in these hands with 3 or more players dealt in. While there was clearly some unspoken cooperation or agreement in their heads-up hands, no other players were harmed or affected by this play.
In accordance with the Terms and Conditions of the PokerStars VIP Club as posted above, Chiren80 and 3J55 have forfeited all VPPs and FPPs earned during their heads-up play on July 13th and 14th. Both players have been issued warnings that any future violations will result in more severe consequences. In addition, despite no evidence of collusion in multi-handed play, these players will be placed in a Related User Group and thus disallowed from sitting at the same cash game or STT table together.
And Chiren80 has issued this statement:
This entire situation is the result of my stupid behaviour. And acting deceptive in this thread has only added to it. I should have known better cause it shows disrespect towards pokerstars, 2+2 and mainly towards myself.
I learned an important lesson out of this and will not make this mistake again. As a pokerstars representative i should be a good example for players and will improve my efforts to be so. I want to emphasize that my actions haven’t harmed any 3rd parties but pokerstars, for which i got a warning and my vpp’s and fpp’s removed.
I will be donating 8000$ to charity to acknowledge my mistake.
A sincere apology.
ps: the reason i haven't been active the past half year is because i’ve been working on a huge new project i’ll be releasing the coming months. You won’t be disappointed.
The reaction to the statements on 2p2 has been largely negative. Not least from the fact that Chiren80's apology ends with some self promotion, but there are many comments from people saying that the punishment isn't tough enough and some have accused PokerStars of favoritism.
When players have been caught chip-dumping in the past it almost always results in a permanent ban from the site. However PokerStars has decided that this wasn't a case of chip-dumping by their definition of the meaning. They decided that although the players were "dumping" chips back and forward, they did so to abuse the VIP system rather that to transfer monies under the radar, and have issued their normal punishment for such an offence.
I think this will be quite a tough punishment and hard lesson for both Chiren80 and 3J55 as they both 24-table the same games. Now that they can't sit at the same tables, they can't get their normal volume of hands in to reach Supernova Elite again, there just aren't enough tables running. It's also a major blow to Chiren80's image in the poker community which was already fairly low due to his reputation as a "break-even rakeback pro". However he remains a PokerStars user and PokerStars representative so it's in his own hands how he goes forward and tries to recover from this.
PokerStars have been running a MicroMania promotion for it's micro stakes players, giving them extra VPPs and FPPs for their play this month.
One of PokerStars' Team PROs, Chiren80, who is known for his AtheneWins youtube channel, seems to have found a way to exploit this promotion. He was spotted playing heads up versus his friend '3J55' (who originally introduced Chiren80 to poker) on many €10NL tables, dumping chips back and forward in order to generate lots of rake / VPPs.
Chrien80 and 3J55 had figured that with them both being Supernova Elites and Chiren80 having a sponsorship deal worth $1 per 7 VPPs earned in addition to SNE benifits, that they could earn more than 100% rakeback on these microstakes tables. So they went to work chipdumping back and forward on the €10NL tables making easy money from PokerStars on every single hand that they played.
The head of PokerStars VIP Club "Steve D" has said that this type of action is considered abuse and that Chiren will no longer be doing it. He said that any action taken against Chiren80 and 3J55, if any action is taken, would remain confidential.
Having a look at the PokerStars TOS for the VIP club I notice:
11. Any abuse of the program or failure to follow program rules may result in the termination of membership and forfeiture of all accrued VPPs and FPPs.
I think the most likely outcome from this would be PokerStars removing all the VPPs earned during the abuse. However one has to think that Team PROs, the representatives of the site, should be held to a much higher standard than other players on the site. PokerStars are paying him to represent their site while he plays on their client, but what casual players see when they hit that "find a team pro" button is this player passing chips back and forward in an effort to exploit his "employer" for financial gain.
Steve D also stated that this incident was not being investigated by the security team. "This is not a security issue. Cooperation in two-handed games isn't technically considered collusion.". However, people have posted screenshots where there was a 3rd player on a table while they were doing this.
When news broke of this incident on 2p2 Chiren80 made the following statement:
"When the promo came out i started to play 24 tables 10NL as its very chill and good vpp's. 3j55 started to join my tables and play more and more aggressive vs me and i adapted ending up table selecting to be heads up vs him all the time.
I have won some and lost some the accusations in this thread are not in line with how i'm playing you can check the hand histories. I'm neither flipping nor chipdumping nor colluding and am not breaking any rules in the TOS.
If someone sticks it in with almost ATC its normal u call/shuv with botton pair.
And starting to play tight will only make him play tighter aswell which is minus ev for me.
I'm replying for the people that want a clear answer from me because i know that to some haterz it doesn't matter what i say.
As an online pro or normal player i wouldn't do anything illegal, if Pokerstars say it is i will stop immediately, although i don't think it's the case because i have informed myself and even talked to them as some people accused me of cheating in chatwindow."
This statement is just full of lies. It's so ridiculous that it's laughable.
People on the forum were quick to call him out. For one, people knew that 3J55 was his friend, in fact it's even been stated on 3J55's blog that they "share ev" (they normally 24-table the same fullring 100NL/200NL games and share the difference in won/lost "all-in ev" in an effort to reduce variance.)
Secondly the whole story that Chiren80 was seeking out 3J55 to actually play poker against the guy, adjusting to him, etc. etc. was ridiculed by some hand histories and stats.
Stats show him losing over $3,500 over ~6000 hands of 10NL, but he really expects people to believe that he was game selecting to play this guy because he thought he could beat him easily.
Posted by goldieshorn: 1. 3J55 had $20 you had around $70. 2. 3J55 raised to $5, you re-raised to $18 and 3J55 called. 3. 3J55 went all in with his remaining $2, you fold. 4. See number 3. You do this over and over again?
I can only imagine that Chiren and Jess, somehow (and I don't know how) did not think they were doing anything wrong, because they have both come across to me as very intelligent guys in the past. But even then, the blatant lies by Chiren when it was uncovered just makes him look so much worse.
10-account Russian ShortStack bot ring on PokerStars
Whilst grinding some 50NL on stars, 2p2er malloc looked up some stats for players at his tables and found 3 short-stacking players who had very similar winrates at each level and who moved up and down the stakes at exactly the same times, obviously very suspicious.
The website Poker Table Ratings took notice of malloc's 2p2 observations and did some investigating, which lead them to find a total of 10 accounts that they believe to be bots.
VPIP, PFR and 3bet even when filtered to each position are identical. Drilling down even further stuff like flop raise % and flop aggression frequency are identical.
These bot accounts have played as many as 1 million hands each and are from locations in Russia and eastern European countries. They played a simple short-stack strategy which earned them $58K in profit as well as VIP bonuses from a $187K of generated rake.
The accounts remained active throughout the night after the PTR article was publish and were then suspended by PokerStars.
There's a large 2p2 thread about this incident and a lot of posters believe that PokerStars has "dropped the ball" by not catching these bots sooner. It also looks pretty embarrasing for Stars to have a 3rd party website find these bots before they did.
However PokerStars bot specialist Jeff had the following to say:
"We would like to address the fact that the play continued throughout the night of July 16th, after a third party source posted an independent review identified 7 additional players. PokerStars had also identified 7 additional players very early in our investigation -- prior to the third party site's identification of them. We were conducting a very in depth search to locate other potential accounts, to ensure we had located all of the accounts prior to closing them down concurrently. Shutting down only part of a ring in mid-investigation can spook additional, undiscovered accounts into cashing out prior to locating them. As of this afternoon, July 17, that review concluded that the ten accounts were the complete extent of the matter."
I also noticed that PokerStars security specialist Micahel Josem made the following statement on twitter, which would seem relevant to this incident:
"@michaeljosem: People who think that massively data mining is the solution to big security challenges have no idea of the volume of data that needs to be s"
The fact is that one player noticed these accounts and their striking irregularities, and a 3rd party found conclusive evidence against them. By the time the accounts were caught millions of hands had been played.
addressing this issue PokerStars Jeff said:
"Finally, to address why these players played for a relatively extended period without detection, we can say that upon conclusion of this review that the bots were fairly sophisticated in certain aspects, including their human behavior modeling and their stealth capabilities. Our tools for bot detection are sophisticated, but they are not perfect. No site can guarantee you that they are completely free of bots. What PokerStars can and does pledge is that we use our extensive tools behind the scenes to detect bots as best we can... and they are very effective. We detect and remove most bots well before they even leave the development stage, and well before they could play long enough to come to the attention of players or third party databases the way these players did."
However the response to this statement has been entirely negative among the forum users.
RNiner: "I just have to say, that this doesn't cut it. If your 'sophisticated systems' couldn't detect these 10 players after millions of hands, then you need a new system.
If PTR hadn't detected these guys they'd still be playing. Given the timing of what has happened, saying anything else is just silly. Whoever started the investigation, you guys shut these guys down one day after a PTR article outed them. They ran for months and months before that. So obviously they played a role.
We expect systems that can detect these guys BEFORE THEY PLAY MILLIONS OF HANDS, not after they've raped the games for months. Maybe that is outside the scope of your technology. Intelligent posters in this thread say it shouldn't be. Common sense says to me there should be some way to do this better."
NOSUP4U: "My god this is terrible! So we're supposed to believe that you guys were totally on the ball and after a year of not having any idea about bots on your site you just happened to come up with all the same data that PTR released a day ahead of you all on your own.
Oh and they're sophisticated bots so your highly trained detection staffed missed them? YEAH WE CAN TELL HOW SOPHISTICATED THEY ARE! THEY ALL HAVE THE EXACT SAME STATS! I'm not sure what exactly your detection methods are, but maybe tell your staff to go back to basics and look at the easy stuff?
Nobody here expects any guarantee that your site is 100% bot free. But we do expect you to go out of your way to make sure you catch bots. And we do expect you to catch ones that are ridiculously obvious like these."
The French are on strike
When the French aren't busy surrendering or watching their football team make a complete c*** of themselves on the international stage they enjoy spending their time blasting off their hard earned cash playing poker.
Unfortunately for winning poker players across the globe, the French government has taken note of the millions of euros being donked out of their economy by their poker-playing citizens and have taken action.
New laws that were recently enforced have made it illegal for French players to play on .com poker sites. They now must play on .fr sites only with other French players, with the government taking a 2% tax directly from each pot.
The approach from PokerStars, on their new PokerStars.fr site, was to increase the standard rake from 5% to 7.7%, increase the rake cap and start raking pots where there was no flop. Also SNG / Tournament fees increased. The midstakes turbo SNGs are now raked at 10.62% on .fr, compared to .com's 6.66 - 9%.
The French players are pretty pissed off about the whole thing. Not only are they forced to play with a much smaller pool of players, but the increase in rake makes the games practically unbeatable.
Although the isolation from the global poker world and compulsory tax were brought about through French government legislation a lot of the anger from players has been directed at PokerStars. Players are upset that they are expected to take the full hit of the tax with the site absorbing none of it, plus the fact that 5% + 2% DOES NOT equal the new 7.7% rate, PokerStars are taking more rake into the bargain.
So a good old french revolution was called and players started a strike by sitting at as many tables as possible and sitting out, effectively blocking anyone from playing on that table. At one point there were over 300 tables blocked because of the strike.
As for the impact of all this, well the guy who was leading the protests on a French forum said he was called by the very low key big-boss at PokerStars, Isai Scheinberg, where it was explained that PokerStars can't absorb any of the French tax because they are making a loss in the French market. Seems unbelievable but apparently Isai has even offered to open up the financial books to prove this fact.
But looking at the rake page on pokerstars.fr it now appears that Stars have got rid of the preflop rake, so that is some progress at least.
And for people all around the world who think this doesn't concern them just because they don't live in France, be very concerned because your country could be next. Everyone still keen on USA regulating online gaming?
Around 10 months ago (August '09) a trusted poster on the Blonde Poker forums, Neil 'Blatch' Blatchly set up a thread asking for stakes into football trading fund, to make trades on the Betfair website.
For those that don't know, Betfair is a "betting exchange" where users bet against each other with the website taking a small commission. Users can either back or lay any selection. The type of trading that Blatch requested investment for involved predicting a shift in the odds before the kick-off of live televised english football matches that had high volume of betting action. No "in running" bets would be made, a selection would be backed and then layed again before the match started. With large enough sums being used in the trade his backing of a selection would also be significant enough to move the line, giving him better odds when he later lays the same selection. This type of trading can be potentially profitable and is low risk compared to the size of the bets because by backing/laying the same selection you're working off relatively small margins.
I didn't invest in this, so everything you read here is my impartial interpretation of what happened based on what has been said in ridiculously long forum threads.
Since starting to trade with a small bankroll in August (Start of the English Premier League season), Blatch posted a huge streak of "wins" on matches where there had been a significant shift in the betting line pre-game. This success, along with the idea that making bigger bets would allow him to move the line more in his favour, brought in more investors for larger sums of money. The largest of the investors were his friends, who knew him through playing live events in the UK and through the online community. Until recently he had been posting that current bankroll was £80,000, with 3 very well known UK players having investments of around £10,000, and he was still accepting new investments right up until last week.
The fund was supposed to end with the English Premier League season but Blatch wanted to continue by trading World Cup matches. After some people asked for cashouts and he told them they'd have to wait a month or so some suspicions were raised. Then a new user on the forum, arbboy (Mark Wilson), made quite a few posts in the staking thread saying that things didn't add up. He posted a number of questions to Blatch, firstly stating that he had been following the thread and thought it was very strange that Blatch missed out on the most profitable trading opportunity of the world cup so far, the South Korea vs Greece match. After some weak responses by Blatch arbboy kept making posts that basically said that he smelled a rat. A huge majority of forum posters and moderators defended Blatch, their trusted friend, and accused the user arbboy of classless trolling. Arbboy was soon banned from the forum and his posts deleted.
But a few investors started to become uneasy when thinking about some of the points raised by arbboy and started pressing Blatch for answers. It wasn't long before it was revealed that all the funds in the account had been lost.
Blatch sent a PM to investors that included the following
Blatch PM:
Going back a few months everything was fine and going great. Everything I had posted was spot on and then one day I had made a trade on a midday kick off between Liverpool and Stoke and I simply didnt wake up in time. I must have not set my alarm right but basically I woke up with around 15 mins to go. At this point I could only rescue about 15% of the bank. I threw up at the time realising what had happened but for some stupid reason I decided that I could get the money back by the end of the season. Basically since then I have been trading the games still but without actually putting the amounts on. I was hoping that I would be able to raise the money by the end of the season and therefore the results would still be ok.
He said that he continued for many months to make trades "on paper" to keep up appearances, even though his account was near empty. He has since stated:
yes some of the losses werent infactual truth. It was to reduce the account balance and therefore I had to win less back. I know this whole thing is one serious mess up and I really want to turn this round and get people their money back.
Pages and pages of furious responses ensued from investors, including those who invested after the point that he claims to have lost most of the fund's money.
LOJ:
FACT. You lost the roll before I invested! Fucking ridiculous that you still had the balls to say more people could invest after you were sat there knowing you had “lost” people their cash (more than likely spunked it all on roulette on some dodgy site somewhere) Maybe saying to potential new investors that it wasn’t open to any more would have been a start?!?
FACT. You put bull shit results up on to keep people hooked! Where did you honestly think you were going to get £80k to pay people back to cover your lies?
FACT. You are a liar and a thief & the biggest grimmer ever...
....
ForthThistle:
Why did you still accept peoples money last week.Huh???
I know everyone can feck up but if this was 3 months ago
and you still pm'd me asking if I was wanting to be involved
last week.
.....
jizzemm:
I am quite angry, especially as it seems that me and brother seemed to have invested after this liverpool game where it had all gone wrong, and that taking the money was only making a situation worse, but I suppose would give you some funds to try and build the bank up.
Although there is no way to know if the spreadsheet was doctored before being passed on to investors the first observations from looking at the spreadsheet were that on this Stoke vs Liverpool match that he claimed to lose £50,000 he actually won £22,000 but that there was a whole load of betting on other stuff, including £5000 1.01 odds bets on cricket that he lost, multiple tennis bets up to £13,000 and a whole bunch of bets on everything from Darts to Motor Racing.
Betting at odds of 1.01 (wagering £100 to win £1) on some random guy to make 50 runs in the cricket seems absurd and is summed up by this post from Ismene.
Ismene:
I can also see two bets on the 21/01/2010 line number 3033 and 3034.... £5000 each time backing Raquibul Hasan in Bangladesh vs India first test @1.01. and the second time backing Niclas Fasth in Group B of the Abu Dhabi Champs.
Both bets in my opinion Blatch new had barely no chance of winning, and are low volume markets. It certainly looks to me like he has put up £5000 to lay at 1.01 on his own betfair account (knowing nobody would take that bet), and logged in on the trading account and backed it for £5k. Both times, within 6 hours of each other. Obviously both bets lost as they are more like 1000 than 1.01 and Blatch makes £10k just like that.
So it started to become clear from looking at the spreadsheet that Blatch's investments as he reported them in his thread were false and that he was actually using this Betfair account to fund his "balla lifestyle" and his sick gambling addiction. He even took his family to Florida recently on a 5-star vacation, posting pictures and facebook updates of him living the highlife.
People reading this must be wondering how he managed to go so long before people figured out he was scamming. Well, similar to Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, Blatch's fund was apparently making such huge returns that most people were keen to leave their money in the fund long term rather than cash out profits in the short term. The few people who did request cashouts could be repaid as he was still taking money from new investors who were impressed by the success that he was reporting to have. Being friends with many trusted members of the UK poker community (both live and online) who also had invested in him gave further confidence to investors that their money was safe.
Blatch also had a staking thread for the WSOP (now deleted) where people had staked him $10,000. It now seems he had no intentions of going to vegas and that money was all part of the same scam. In addition to this many people came forward to say they had other private deals with Blatch which they were stuck for too.
skolsuper:
I was one of the people with £10k in this and from other dealings with Blatch I am in for around £20k total.
Since all this has come out, Neil Blatchly has confessed to a gambling addiction, claims to be completely busto and now living with his parents (he's in his mid 30's). He said that he plans to pay everyone back by getting a job and selling his crappy ford fiesta. Meanwhile, people aren't convinced. The dumping of funds to another account of his (the 1.01 odds cricket bets for example) lead people to believe that he may be hiding money away that he has scammed.
Lots of the investors (there were around 40 or so of them) have said that this was money they couldn't afford to lose, or that it was money they had earmarked for a trip to Vegas this summer, that they will now miss out on.
However, while a lot of backing and staking goes on in the poker community, and some people do extremely well out of it, it is never wise to invest more than you are prepared to and can afford to lose. Even the most trusted of people have turned out to be scammers, nothing is without risk in this game, bare it in mind.
The douchebag pic is a favorite avatar of your typical egotistical, fake tanned, kissy faced douchebag. I mean, when you spend your whole entire day looking in the mirror it's the natural to chose a photo of yourself as your avatar. I wonder, do these guys really think that other poker players want to sit and look at a picture of some dude's face while they are playing? I guess they do! Right-click -> Block Image -> GTFO.
These "poker enthusiasts" spend far too much time watching poker on TV and not enough time working on their own game. Word of advice guys, you're never going to get better at poker by watching Mike Matusow and Chris Ferguson play a donk-n-go on Poker After Dark. And just because you watched durrrr 3-bet 73s in a deepstacked TV cashgame it doesn't mean that you can do the same thing profitably with a 30bb stack in some turbo SNG.
This is another very accurate tell that a player is bad. Unfortunately these players are rarely found playing above the very micro-est of micro stakes offered on the site.
This entire situation is the result of my stupid behaviour. And acting deceptive in this thread has only added to it. I should have known better cause it shows disrespect towards pokerstars, 2+2 and mainly towards myself.
The website Poker Table Ratings took notice of malloc's 2p2 observations and did some investigating, which lead them to find a total of 10 accounts that they believe to be bots.
The French are on strike
People reading this must be wondering how he managed to go so long before people figured out he was scamming. Well, similar to Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme, Blatch's fund was apparently making such huge returns that most people were keen to leave their money in the fund long term rather than cash out profits in the short term. The few people who did request cashouts could be repaid as he was still taking money from new investors who were impressed by the success that he was reporting to have. Being friends with many trusted members of the UK poker community (both live and online) who also had invested in him gave further confidence to investors that their money was safe.
