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This ghosting scandal took place in a “private club”, via an app with passwords. The players had to be vetted, and there were certain controls in place specifically to protect against ghosting such as having your computer camera on—the way they got around that is that Cates and his cohort used a remote PC access program. In 2007, Josem helped uncover a cheating scandal involving Absolute Poker and UltimateBet that ultimately led to close to $38 million in compensation payments being sent to cheated players. Daniel “Jungleman” Cates expressed remorse for ghosting a recreational player in a private online poker home game, but he denies ever having played against Dan Bilzerian and claims he wasn’t the. The action was paused in the Daniel Negreanu vs. Doug Polk ‘Grudge Match’ under bizarre circumstances over the past 24 hours as Bill Perkins, who has a bet in place on the match’s outcome.

With over $4 million in winnings, the 24 year old Sorel Mizzi is indeed one of the games rising stars having amassed his fortune on both the live and the online arena.
However, the young Canadian pro has had to deal with a whole load of controversy along the way and has admitted to cheating, as well as having been cheated during his brief but spectacular career.
A year and a half ago, Mizzi famously lost around half a million dollars to card cheats in Monte Carlo.
Before then in December 2007, however, Mizzi was embroiled in a cheating scandal at Full Tilt poker in which he took over play of a friends account in the middle of an online tournament. Despite then winning the event, Mizzi was disqualified and his friend and senior editor of Bluff Magazine Chris Vaughn lost his job from the magazine.
Now in the latest piece of unwelcome news to hit the beleaguered poker pro, Sorel Mizzi recently came under scrutiny from the poker community, after a discussion thread allegedly involving Mizzi and Steve “Thorladen” Weinstein appeared on the TwoPlusTwo forum, in which they discussed a high tech method of cheating during online tournaments.
The method involved using a remote PC access programs to access computers in different locations, which would “revolutionizes teaching/ghosting in poker (and) can also be used for multi-accounting.”
Responding to the allegations made against him, Mizzi dismissed the alleged conversation as the work of a criminal who had tried to blackmail him in return for not releasing the forged transcript. As he explains in a TwoPlusTwo forum statement:
“Late last year, I got a message from the extortionist threatening to release what he had fabricated if I didn’t send him money online. I chose to completely ignore the threats.”
Sorel Mizzi concluded his response by stating; “NOBODY in the history of online poker has had their reputation unfairly tainted more than I have.”

[I’ve written a little update to this post to add to some concepts below.]

This is Dan Cates

They call him Jungleman. He is within the top seven poker players in the world right now. Remember that number.

Poker Ghosting Scandal Latest

I am a very good researcher. I like to think of myself as a good poker player. I only make a living at one. And I don’t yet have a cool moniker like Texas Dolly, Kid Poker, Timex, The Mouth, or Jungleman*. It does not mean that I do not immerse myself, too much, probably, in the world of high stakes poker. Many people would say though, that poker is an excellent metaphor or teaching tool for life.

There are various books out there making the analogy between poker and life or poker and business. Two different successful female poker players, Liz Boeree and Annie Duke have leveraged their poker sucess into forms of life coaching. Here’s Ms. Boeree’s TEDX talk on thinking with probabilities as learned via poker, and here’s Ms. Duke’s book, Thinking In Bets, where she also applies lessons of the poker table to life writ large. I firmly believe that much can be learned from playing poker. Or just in reading about poker players.

Poker Ghosting Scandal Podcast

I learned, like a lot of other poker geeks a week or so ago, that a “top seven” poker player was cheating. As one poker podcaster said later, it was good to be considered the eighth best. The allegation was thrown out on Twitter by someone named Bill Perkins, who exemplifies my dreams of being a successful businessman yet associated with the poker immortals. It came out a day or so later that the player in question was Dan Cates. Jungleman.

The crime, Cates was accused of, is called “ghosting”. Not the kind of ghosting where you go on a few dates and then never text back. This ghosting is when you play online poker under someone else’s account. In other words, the online avatar could say ManageRisks but the person playing would not be Rob Gardner but rather Dan Cates. The thinking would be that Cates and I would be sandbagging the crowd, that they would not expect ManageRisks to be a shark, and we’d take them for a bundle.

Which brings us to the lessons of the day. This ghosting scandal took place in a “private club”, via an app with passwords. The players had to be vetted, and there were certain controls in place specifically to protect against ghosting such as having your computer camera on—the way they got around that is that Cates and his cohort used a remote PC access program. The lead, the person named on the account, the one not supposed to be a top seven player, sat in front of the laptop and appeared to be playing. Cates hidden away, made the smart moves. See where I am going. On one hand, the game knew there were risks. They did not allow anyone to play, and they inserted controls to protect the game. The players still got duped. A concerted effort by people you trust wrecks the best of systems. Due diligence fail?

I listened to a podcast on this scandal the other day. The essential weakness exploited, they explained, was allowing Windows/PC systems to play. With just Apple/IOS there is no ability to do the remote play. It’s always easy to find the control flaw after. My only message, my whole point, way down here at the bottom of the blog post, is that it’s a jungle out there. You may think you’re playing poker with friends and it turns out you’re not. In this case, literally, you are not. In business, you may think you are doing business with friends. I’ve seen a lot of people decline business background research because they thought they were playing with friends. Most of the time they are. Yet, it’s a jungle out there and sometimes you are not. Do your due diligence.

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*Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson, Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu, Mike “Timex” McDonald, Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, Dan “Jungleman” Cates