Self-inflicted wounds continue to damage online poker efforts

When it rains, it pours, and for Poker Twitter, last week was monsoon season.

First were allegations leveled by two-time Global Poker Index Player of the Year Alex Foxen against current GPI POY Ali Imsirovic. According to Foxen, Imsirovic is banned from GG Poker for multi-accounting and using real-time assistance.

Poker black-list can't come soon enough.
Ali is banned from GG for Multi-accounting and RTA. I have witnessed numerous chip dumps to horses, and many suspicious changes in play from people known to be his horses when deep in online MTTs.

— Alex Foxen (@WAFoxen) April 18, 2022

Then there were the accusations from Martin Zamani that the all-time leader in tournament winnings, Bryn Kenney, ran a “cult-like” poker staking operation, with members colluding with one another.

https://twitter.com/martin_zamani/status/1517178128212250631

Imsirovic hasn’t responded publicly, but Kenney has.

https://twitter.com/BrynKenney/status/1518252735556071425

For this column, the veracity of the accusations doesn’t matter. What matters is the perception of poker when these accusations (true or false) are thrust into the spotlight.

A Long History of Scandals

Cheating scandals and impropriety are nothing new in the poker world. The industry has dealt with insider cheating scandals, online poker sites going bust and leaving players with nothing more than an IOU, and countless allegations of individuals or teams cheating their fellow poker players, from Ali Tekintamgac to Mike Postle to Christian Lusardi.

In addition to countless accusations of fraud and backing scams, ghosting, multi-accounting, and hole-carding, high-profile scandals have battered poker’s reputation. This list would become unwieldy if it went back to the earliest days of online poker, but here’s a highlight reel:

Some of these are demonstratively worse than others, whether it’s in size, scope or where it falls on the unethical to the illegal line. black l detail

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

These outlier events aren’t representative of the larger poker community.

These guys have damaged poker. Their scandals will scare away millions of players (esp online players). And, Imagine that you’re a young player, and you look up to these guys, so you seek them out, only to find out that they are cheaters. So, you pursue another profession: sad!

— phil_hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth) April 24, 2022

Unfortunately, these stories serve as a confirmation bias, as the details are often so shocking that they become fodder for the mainstream press. And it’s these stories that come up far too often in legislatures discussing legalizing online poker. They are a gift from the poker community to anti-poker advocates and skeptical lawmakers and have been for years.

Sheldon Adelson was using this as one of his streams of attack on online poker as far back as 2014:

“They could be flying high and out of control of themselves, and what are they going to do with the poker players that are experts at playing poker. They’re just gonna clean everybody out? Like they do in the poker clubs and various casinos.”

In a 2013 Congressional hearing, Congressman Billy Long (who is still representing Missouri’s 7^th District) asked the following about Chris Moneymaker’s impact on poker and the subsequent Poker Boom:

“So that really put jet fuel into the whole Internet poker thing, which it thrived for several years until the Black Friday shutdown. But during that, there were some very high-profile cheating scandals where the operators of these sites were actually looking at your cards, at the other people they were playing cards, and with the skill of the poker players, I think 60 Minutes did a special on that. If this legislation goes through, how can people be assured that that type of activity does not continue, or starts in again I guess?”

When New York was considering legalizing online poker, Assemblyman Gary Pretlow told PokerNews that cheating was still a concern:

“I still have issues with people cheating. Demonstrations of geolocation have kind of settled my mind that they do work, and people outside of the jurisdiction won’t be able to get in. But I still have an issue with five people sitting around the kitchen table on computers, all playing against you. The defense is that they have algorithms that protect against that, but right now, I don’t trust that. It’s a serious question I’ve had for a while, and it hasn’t been proven to me that doesn’t happen.”

Upshot

Essentially, the greed found at the highest stakes in the poker community is counterproductive to legalization.

Poker should be one of the easiest forms of gambling to convince lawmakers to legalize due to its skill-based and peer-to-peer nature and ubiquitous presence in American culture. But until the poker community can stamp out these concerns (either through crackdowns or policies like capping the stakes at online poker sites), when it comes to legalization, poker will continue to lag other forms of gambling like daily fantasy sports and sports betting.