All the buzz in the poker world right now is about José “Girah” Macedo scamming high stakes cash players for over $30,000. Basically it boils down to a few young immature poker players working together to scam some people who unfortunately trusted them. More information can be found here. It's sad that this happens and while it does shed a bad light on poker, and particularly online poker, one should realize that cheating, scamming and lying goes on in most fields to one extent or the other. How many people have gotten ahead in the corporate world by stabbing someone else in the back, plenty. How many people are guilty of some form of insider trading, plenty. Actually my guess is more crooked business goes on in the corporate world in a day than happens in the poker world in a year. I also think it's over looked more in the corporate world, if not almost expected. You cheat and scam in the poker world you will be caught and exposed and blacklisted by everyone in the field. No excuses are good enough for people caught cheating in the poker world. I really commend everyone on 2+2 for getting to the bottom of this and exposing the cheaters. The saddest part in my opinion is that the guys involved were winning players who should of been able to make an honest living from just playing poker and had no real need to cheat in order to make money. Unfortunately one of the lessons most people learn from this is to watch out who you trust, which is a shame since I believe most poker players are pretty trustworthy people.
Now for people who insist on tapping the aquarium. I was playing in a 10NL cash game earlier and there was this sweet fishcake at the table. He was running 48/10 or so over quite a number of hands and he would get lucky and win a pot or two then lose it all back. I lost some money to him in an earlier hand but had won all of it back plus almost another buy in. Then some brilliant idiot decides to say something like "...and that's why you never get ahead". I relied with shhh! stop tapping and this big mouth goes on to say the guy doesn't know the difference. Well the guy immediately tightens up and I wasn't able to win any more off of him. I've seen this happen so much since I had to start playing on Merge and I just wish people would realize how stupid it is to do this. Poker players win off people who play the game badly and when someone points out to them that they are playing badly it's screws it up for everyone else. So people if you can't say something nice to someone at the table don't say anything at all! Keep your tilted ranting to yourself and STFU!
As for me and my game, not much new there. I'm still running like a three legged dog on an icy road in MTTs. I started playing some cash, as I mentioned earlier, and cash games seem to be going much better than MTTs so for now I'm playing cash five or six days a week and only playing low stakes MTTs one or two days a week. Hopefully my bankroll will begin to improve, as well as my luck in MTTs.
Well good luck and hope you all win, win, and win some more!
