Hall of Shame for Online Poker Cheaters
Fuck Online Poker keeps this list of those who have been caught cheating online poker.
List of Online Poker CheatersNick Niergarth gbmantisBrian Townsend sbrugbyMark Teltscher TheV0idChris Vaughn BluffMagCVSorel Mizzi Imper1umMark Seif Absolute PokerJustin Bonomo ZeeJustinJosh Fields JJProdigyScott Tom & AJ Green POTRIPPER |
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gbmantis
gbmantis: Multi-accounting. Nick "gbmantis" Niergarth was caught multi-accounting on Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker in an sophisticated cheating scandal involving other players including JJProdigy, one of the most famous online poker cheaters in history. gbmantis played in the biggest tournaments on both sites regularly and has been caught using friends accounts to play tournaments and taking over friends accounts late in tournaments that he already got busted out earlier himself.
Accusations of chip dumping and colluding with friends playing in the same tournament have also surfaced. gbmantis is one of the biggest and most widely recognized named cheaters who have been caught in recent years. Close friends with his mentor Josh JJProdigy Fields, who is serving a lifetime ban from Internet poker but strongly rumored to be regularly playing under someone else's account, gbmantis has destroyed his own reputation through the recent cheating scandal. One way in which gbmantis cheated would be to take over a friend's account who records show has always been a small limit player usually playing $2 or $5 tournaments. All of a sudden, this small timer is winning $100 rebuy tournaments and entering other large buy-in tournaments. After scoring big, the small time would transfer his money and go back to playing smaller buy-in tournaments again but now because he earned a commission from the big score of over $200,000 gbmantis won on his account can now afford to play $24 tournaments regularly. One of these accounts belongs to YourTimeIsUp (YTIU, aka stealthmunk) Justin Schwartz one of gbmantis roommates.
Nick Niergarth's player to player transfer history and that of the accounts he used to play with link gbmantis to the entire cheating ring and provided enough evidence that Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker investigated and determined he was a online poker cheater.
Brian Townsend
Brian Townsend: Multi-accounting. Brian Townsend the Cardrunners Poker Instructor and Full Tilt Pro has been caught multi-accounting in some of the biggest online poker games in the world. Playing 25-50 Pot Limit Omaha all the way up to 200-400 Pot Limit Omaha, Brian Townsend used the online screen name sbrugby as his main account that was highlighted in Red marking him as a Full Tilt Poker Pro. Brian Townsend then created a second account to disguise his identity from the players he normally plays against at those high stakes.
Brian not only was multi-accounting at Full Tilt Poker, but Brian Townsend also created a second account on Pokerstars for the same purpose of cheating by disguising his identity and therefore his playing style from the regulars he plays against.
Brian Townsend was using the screen name Stellarnebula on Full Tilt Poker and the screen name Makersmark66 on PokerStars. Brian Townsend normal Pokerstars account name is aba20 and Brian Townsend's normal Full Tilt Poker account name is sbrugby.
Brian Townsend was able to gain an unfair advantage over his opponents because he knew the tendencies of his opponents while his opponents seemingly would not know anything about the playing style of this seemingly new player that was really being used by Brian Townsend. Not only is this against the Full Tilt Poker Policy to have more then one account, but as a Full Tilt Pro Brian Townsend should be kept to the highest standards of fair play. Brian Townsend multi-accounting on Pokerstars also breaks the Pokerstars Policy of one account per player.
TheV0id
TheV0id: Multi-accounting. British professional poker player, Mark Teltscher was tripped of his WCOOP Championship win on Pokerstars including the first place prize of $1.2 Million, the largest payout for a tournament winner in online poker history. ‘TheV0id’ account was set up by Mark Teltscher whose had success on the European Poker Tour. Mark Teltscher set the account up for his sister, Natalie Teltscher, although his sister had apparently, not played in any high stakes poker tournaments before. Evidence showed that this poker pro took over his sister's account and continued to play after he had been eliminated earlier from the WCOOP event.
Sorel Mizzi Imper1um
Chris "BluffMagCV" Vaughn & Sorel "Imper1um" Mizzi: During October 2007, Chris "BluffMagCV" Vaugh who is an employee at Bluff Magazine, won the Full Tilt Poker $1M Guaranteed Tournament for $197,000 and Poker Stars $1M Guaranteed for $240,000 using the name "SlippyJacks" in consecutive Sundays. A month later, Full Tilt Poker took away the title and took back his winnings because they discovered evidence that Sorel "Imper1um" Mizzi took control of his account towards end of the tournament. Imper1um had played in the same tournament and had been knocked out earlier, thus technically multi-accounting and using this unfair advantage to win the title for Chris Vaughn. A European pro Soren Kongsgaard, who finished 2nd, was awarded first place by Full Tilt. When Soren received the email from Full Tilt that included that he was "among the victims of one player using more than one Full Tilt account in the tournament.", Soren posted it into the 2+2 forum and the poker world came down hard on the two cheaters. As a very successful and popular online poker player, Mizzy's reputation is ruined, he tried to respond to the criticism here on pocket fives. Imper1um took over with an agreement to finish the tournament BluffMagCV for a percentage of the winnings. Both players have been permanently banned from Full Tilt Poker.
Mark Seif
Mark Seif: The face of Absolute Poker. Absolute Poker representative repeatedly denied wrongdoing by Absolute Poker following irrefutable evidence in the Absolute Poker Scandal and proclaimed that a 'super user' account was impossible, despite overwhelming evidence that such an account existed. “A ‘super-user’ account does not exist in our software. Absolute Poker was created by poker players who value security and fair play. The back-end of the Absolute Poker software prevents the possibility of any such feature. Our game client only receives data regarding individual’s hand and no other player hole cards are ever visible – by anyone – except in the event of a showdown." Though he never cheated himself, his repeated attempts to cover-up the scandal showed a lot about his character, his judgment, and his greed for money. Mark Seif also went as far as to threaten to sue Todd ‘Dandruff’ Whittles for posting his suspicion following his investigation that uncovered the events that took place at Absolute because Seif said the allegations were totally untrue. Now Mark Seif is the fool as the truth has finally surfaced. Below is Mark's response to the allegations, plus his response to a cheating scandal he was involved in during 2006.
Dan Druff responds to Mark Sief:
POTRIPPER
POTRIPPER: The super user account. This account was operated by Absolute Poker Management. Former Absolute Poker CEO Scott Tom and 2nd in command AJ Green profited over $700,000 through the use of a sophisticated scheme and a security flaw in the Absolute Poker system. A superuser account that allowed its user to see all the cards in everyone's hand during play was discovered by Scott Tom. This account was not a playing account however, so he sought the help of AJ Green. Together, AJ Green would play heads up matches, tournaments, and cash games with four real life playing accounts that were abandoned by their respective owners. AJ Green would sit at a table and play while Scott Tom used the super user account to 'observe' the table, meanwhile he would tell AJ Green exactly what his opponents hole cards were. After building his bankroll by destroying everybody he played, the Absolute management cheaters would play heads up matches with friends and family accounts dumping the chips to them. These accounts would cash the money out.
Suspicion after POTRIPPER won a high stakes online poker tournament arose when on the final hand he called an extremely large all-in heads up bet by his opponent. Potripper's opponent was bluffing with merely a nine high, but more unbelievable was POTRIPPER's call with just ten high. POTRIPPER took down the pot and the tournament and it didn't take long for high stakes players to see that the statistics of the ultra aggressive POTRIPPER, whom they had been losing to often in cash games, were way beyond normal. The POTRIPPER Absolute Poker scandal investigation that eventually tied in top level management into the sophisticated cheating shook the online poker world and destroyed the reputation of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet. Read the full story of the Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal.
ZeeJustin
ZeeJustin, in real life Justin Bonomo, at 20 years old was caught by both Party Poker and Pokerstars multi-accounting. As an up in coming poker star who made a European World Poker Tour final table, Justin Bonomo had about $100,000 seized from his accounts. Justin Bonomo brought suspicion to himself by posting in a poker forum about how he discovered a glitch in Party Poker software that allowed a player to rapidly click on the Party Poker icon and open up new sessions of Party Poker. Each new Party Poker session could be logged in with a different account, and this is what ZeeJustin did, using up to 6 accounts in the same multi-table tournament. It turns out Justin had multiple accounts and was entering multi-table tournaments at both Party Poker and Poker Stars. During this raid by Party Poker they proved that Justin was a cheater and confiscated $100,000 from his account. A week before he was caught by Party Poker, ZeeJustin won the Big Sunday $600+40 Pokerstars tournament, and although Pokerstars investigated his account and found he had multi-accounted in a few tournaments, they found his winnings were legit in the Big Sunday tournament where he won $137,000 and let him cash out everything but the $5,000 they associated with cheating before closing his account.
The six accounts all had different biographical and geographical information but were all tracked back to the same IP Address. The account names were ZeeJustin, IBLUFFUOUT69, vapoker58, mehsabjwilson55, and greenb272. ZeeJustin admitted it was purely greed that motivated his cheating, but tried to shift the focus on a lack of security at Party Poker and other cheaters, he posted this under the heading "My Statement" on the 2+2 forum:
"First of all, the accounts were NOT created solely for MTT use. They were originally created for SNG play. It got to the point where everyone knew that ZeeJustin would steal the blinds often, and everyone called him liberally. I created these accounts to erase this loose image. Everyone would be readless against me, and it was a huge advantage. These accounts all did very well in the big SNGs on PartyPoker." ZeeJustin later apology attempt in the pocketfives forum was also met with a huge backlash from the poker community after he wrote that he would negate any advantage if two or more of his accounts ended up at the same table by simply opening up 2 or 3 more sit and gos to distract himself. Justin Bonomo is now serving a lifetime ban from Internet Poker.
JJProdigy
JJProdigy, in real life Josh Fields, Multi-accounting. At 16 years old, he was caught by Party Poker as a cheater. He brought suspicion onto himself after Instant Messaging to friends that he had won $140,000 for first place in Party Poker’s weekly $500,000 Guarantee tourney. Word spread and people started posting congratulations to JJProdigy for winning the tournament. Other players in the same tournament recalled that an unknown account 'ABlackCar' had won that tournament and not the well known JJProdigy (became famous after winning the PokerStars Leader board challenge in August 2005 against Gigabet, gank, Exclusive and other online pros). who had busted out earlier in the same tournament. Party Poker began an investigation and determined ABlackCar and JJProdigy were the same person. Josh Fields initial excuse was the other account belonged to his grandmother, who after he got knocked out was tired and wanted to go to bed, so he took over for her. Party Poker took the $140,000 and $40,000 that was in the other account. Pokerstars and another online poker room also discovered JJProdigy had been cheating there as well and he has been permanently banned from Internet Poker.
In February of 2009, Josh Fields had been playing on the Cake Poker network. JJProdigy was primed to be one of the headliners of the Bluff Challenge in March of 2009 that pitted online poker's most famous players against one another in a battle to see who can build the largest bankroll during one month. Each player was to start with $200 and they could only play multiple table tournaments and single table sit and go tournaments. Right before the competition began, JJProdigy was kicked out of the competition and kicked off of the Cake Poker network for again cheating in online poker. Josh Fields was caught again this time for allegedly allowing other players to use his account, an infraction that goes against all online poker rooms terms of service. This was really the final straw in the court of public opinion amongst poker players, after he had promised to the poker world to never cheat again following the original cheating scandal.
