Words With Friends

Followed with interest the conclusion of the first Epic Poker League Main Event that ended early Saturday morning with David “Chino” Rheem the winner. Also noted, of course, the 2+2 thread and all of the hullaballoo on Twitter and elsewhere regarding Rheem’s many outstanding debts, the obvious joke being his $1 million score had many lining up to meet him at the cashier’s cage.

Rheem’s victory came amid further revelations having to do with that other big story in poker from last week, one that also involved the issue of players trusting one another and getting burned. I’m talking of course about the “Girah” scandal involving Jose Macedo, Haseeb Qureshi, Dan Cates, and others. More has come out regarding that one, particularly with regard to Cates’ involvement and culpability, enough to warrant a revised and expanded “Cliffs notes” post over on 2+2.

At some point last week -- after I’d posted my bit about the “Girah” scandal on Thursday -- I was talking with a friend about it who commented on how incredibly naïve and/or gullible Macedo’s “friends” had to be to get hoodwinked into that whole Skype scam.

I’m talking about the part of the scandal where Macedo persuaded others in his “strategy group” to play a couple of unknowns whom he characterized as fish. Somehow Macedo additionally convinced these others to allow him to view their sessions as they played, using TeamViewer, a desktop sharing tool. His “friends” ended up losing to the fish, and later it was revealed Macedo was either relaying information about his strategy group’s buddies’ hole cards to the “fish” -- or perhaps was even playing those two accounts himself.

My friend and I were chatting about this -- over Skype, in fact -- when he joked that he knew some “aggro fish” who were looking for heads-up action, facetiously asking me to play while he watched. “It boggles the mind,” he said, to think how these guys would allow Macedo -- a person they’d never even met face-to-face -- talk them into playing the unknowns while he watched.

“I don't let anyone look over my shoulder when I play Words With Friends,” was my response.

More naïvety, gullibility, and other ethically-dubious behavior is on display in Cates’ lengthy interview on Subject:Poker that appeared on Friday. There Cates reveals himself to have made numerous bad decisions over recent months, another one seeming to have been his agreeing to give the interview in the first place. Cates -- whom it should be noted is still only 21 years old -- can’t seem to give a straight answer to any question put to him, contradicting himself and even calling back to admit to lying (repeatedly) about having multi-accounted.

All of this drama over “Girah” and Rheem got me thinking further about the value of a person’s word and how such is often said to be of special importance in the poker world. Many poker players -- especially those who’ve been part of the scene for a long time -- speak of the value of a person’s word as in fact being higher in the poker world than outside of it, the frequency of verbal agreements involving money (such as the many Rheem has been accused of failing to honor) a testament to that difference.

There’s something almost counterintuitive about it, really. That poker -- a game based on lying, or at least misrepresenting oneself in ways that serve one’s self-interest -- would be a realm in which people could trust one another more readily than elsewhere. But many insist that is the case, citing the “gambler’s code” and pointing out how stories such as the ones surrounding Rheem and the “Girah” group are noteworthy because of their uniqueness.

Speaking of, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz (who along with Vanessa Selbst conducted the Cates interview for S:P) wrote an interesting post on his personal blog last week titled “The Vouching System Sucks” in which he decries the way many in the poker community overvalue each other’s “word,” particularly when given as a recommendation to trust a third party. And Zimba over on CardRunners added some thoughtful advice last week as well regarding “Protecting Yourself From Cheating.”

“Poker is no different from any sport, business or life situation,” writes Zimba in his post, explaining how one will certainly encounter others failing to honor their word in poker just as one will elsewhere. I tend to agree. While recognizing the uniqueness of the culture of poker -- where the collective pressure to honor one’s word perhaps operates differently than it does outside of poker -- it’s obvious that when it comes to taking a person’s word, you still gotta know with whom you’re dealing.

That is to say, in poker or elsewhere, know who your friends are. And value their words accordingly.

On the “Girah” Saga; or, Online Poker Tied Up in a Knot

Spent a little time this morning rooting around over on Two Plus Two and elsewhere, getting somewhat caught up on this “Girah” saga that appears to involve just about every form of cheating one can imagine in online poker, including multi-accounting, collusion, chip-dumping, and hole-card viewing. The story also features a lot of other examples of ethically suspect behavior, most of which appearing to involve the fabrication of identities online (both for playing poker and for other forms of interaction, including forum posting).

For those with an interest in learning more about it all, the “Cliff notes” post over on 2+2 is a good place to start. There you’ll find a readable synopsis that also links out to many other sources for the sordid tale’s various characters and episodes. Might also dial up the most recent episode of the Two Plus Two Pokercast (episode 184), where they talk a lot about the story as well as interview both Ben “sauce123” Sulsky and “King” Dan Smith about it.

I had started to write a post attempting to cover all the various ins and outs, but after fussing with how best to present the tale’s complicated twists and turns I realized I only had a few substantive observations to add. So rather than clutter the air with another (necessarily incomplete) account of what appears to have been going on over the last seven months or so with this José “Girah” Macedo character (pictured above), I’ll just fire off three observations about it before moving along.

The first concerns one of those involved, Haseeb Qureshi (a.k.a., “DogIsHead” or “INTERNETPOKERS”), loser of that crazy running prop bet with Ashton Griffin earlier this year and recently let go by CardRunners as an instructor.

One “WTF” moment among the many that crop up in this story comes amid Haseeb Qureshi’s BLUFF interview, posted late yesterday. In the interview -- after Qureshi has admitted to multi-accounting, chip dumping, posting multiple times under a different name on Two Plus Two, and getting caught in a lie about being Macedo’s “agent” -- Qureshi is asked a question about Macedo’s original story, the one suggesting the 18-year-old had won more than $1.6 million in a remarkably short stretch even though those results were never corroborated anywhere.

Qureshi (and others, among them Dan “jungleman12” Cates) had maintained in the forums that Macedo’s results were legit, though now that seems likely not to have been the case. Qureshi is asked why he insisted Macedo’s results were genuine without there being any evidence to support that claim.

He “believed them,” Qureshi says, “because people faking results is such a ridiculously rare thing in the poker world. I would never suspect that someone would do anything like that unless they were a massive con artist, which I obviously didn’t imagine.”

Faking results in poker “ridiculously rare”? Probably more accurate to say it’s rare for players not to misrepresent their results. (That graph to the left is one that Macedo -- and/or Qureshi, actually, who says he helped Macedo with the post -- shared early on to show his results, a screenshot that omitted reference to screennames or sites.)

And, it goes without saying, Qureshi himself has many times over shown a readiness to misrepresent, lie, obfuscate, fake, what have you. How does Qureshi himself believe such a statement, let alone expect others to do so?

What is rare, I suppose, is for players to get away with faking results in their online play, particularly in the high-stakes games that are mostly (though not always) tracked by external sites. That leads to my second observation, which is simply to express amazement at how many appear to have been duped by the story of the “Portuguese poker prodigy.”

Lock Poker gave him a sponsorship. Brandon Adams tried to hire him as an instructor at his new Expert Insight website. And numerous other high-profile pros and posters -- not to mention all of the poker media reporting on his dazzling yet undocumented rise to the highest-stakes games -- readily bought in as well.

Sure, in some ways the story resembled that of Isildur1, Cates, and others. And all the various “vouching” going on by others with regard to Macedo played a significant role here as well. But without screen names or any confirmation of accounts played by Macedo, how does it happen that so many accepted his story as legitimate?

Interestingly, it seems as though the great majority of interactions with Macedo took place over Skype or via other online methods of communication -- i.e., there was little face-to-face contact with him by anyone involved, including his most vocal endorsers. Thus does this story demonstrate how the “virtual” world of online communication provides ready opportunities for the creation of personas as well as the potential to build elaborate fictions that are plausible enough to be regarded as fact.

My third observation is simply to reiterate a point already made by others with regard to the “Girah” saga. Without regulation, online poker will certainly continue to attract scammers and others looking to take advantage of a still highly vulnerable environment for financial transactions. Even with regulation, attempts by some to cheat and/or angle-shoot will (unfortunately) remain “part of the game,” although one would hope the chances of their getting away with such would be reduced.

The story made me wonder what exactly “girah” meant, and so I looked it up. Used to refer to a unit of measurement (in India and Pakistan), though with the metric system it is no longer used. Can also refer to a short passage that has been inserted into a song, often an allusion to another song (a kind of “sampling,” one could say).

But apparently the word also literally means “knot,” which I guess would be the most appropriate reference here. A lot of untangling yet to be done with regard to the “Girah” story.

Also a good way to refer to online poker, generally speaking, circa summer 2011. One big messy knot.

Sick Bet: Griffin, Qureshi, and “the World of Poker Players”

Creative, crazy, even dangerous proposition bets have long been part of poker. A few spring to mind.

Huck Seed once bet Phil Hellmuth $10,000 that he could float in the ocean for 24 hours without touching the bottom, though Seed forfeited the bet before making an attempt. Erick Lindgren won $340,000 from Gavin Smith, Phil Ivey, and others after he played 72 holes of golf in one day, shooting under 100 each round, in the 108-degree Vegas heat in June 2007. And this past summer, Ted Forrest won $2 million off Mike Matusow after managing to go from 188 lbs. to under 140 (138, to be exact) in the space of just two months. Forrest fasted the final 10 days straight to win that one.

Trumping them all, I suppose, is Brian Zembic, also a poker player though probably more of a blackjack/backgammon player. In the fall of 1996, Zembic won a $100K prop for receiving breast implants, the story of which was subsequently chronicled in Michael Konik’s 1999 anthology The Man With the $100,000 Breasts and Other Gambling Stories.

However much some want to argue that poker is somehow not gambling -- that its significant skill component allows one to approach the game as a strictly intellectual and/or psychological competition -- it is, in fact, a game that involves chance and is therefore a gambling game. Even if it weren’t, poker’s frequently close proximity to all those other gambling games -- usually just a few steps away in the casino (or a click away online) -- would probably increase the likelihood for action-seeking poker players to seek further opportunities to gamble. Especially when they are encouraged by fellow, like-minded “degens” as they are sometimes described, usually with a semi-serious mix of reproach and wonder.

You probably recently heard about another such prop bet, one involving a couple of young poker players, Ashton “theASHMAN103” Griffin and Haseeb “INTERNETPOKERS” Qureshi. Both have emerged over recent years as part of the latest generation of tough, successful online players, with Griffin additionally enjoying some big live scores including winning the $25,000 High Roller Bounty Shootout event at NAPT Venetian in February 2010.

Like Griffin, Qureshi has been involved in some of the highest-stakes online games, including being an early combatant of Viktor “Isildur1” Blom last year. His well-considered thoughts about those battles and their significance were shared by Qureshi on his CardRunners blog last fall (alluded to here).

Here the two roommates bet whether the 22-year-old Griffin, formerly a college wrestler and by most accounts well-conditioned athlete, could run 70 miles on a treadmill within a 24-hour period. The bet incorporated various provisions, and ultimately went off with Griffin giving Qureshi 3-to-1 on a wager of $285,000, meaning that if Qureshi lost he’d owe Griffin $285K and if Griffin lost he’d owe Qureshi $855K. Griffin booked an additional $15K of action with others, meaning he was risking a total of $900K -- not to mention the physical trauma of running nearly three marathons in one day -- to win $300K.

As reported on many outlets earlier this week, Griffin incredibly succeeded in the task and won the bet. Meanwhile, his friend Qureshi appears to have been affected by much more than having lost a significant portion of his bankroll. Yesterday and today Qureshi published a lengthy two-part account of the bet on his blog: The Million Dollar Bet, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2.

It’s a harrowing read, one that should give a great deal of pause to those eager to celebrate Griffin’s accomplishment and/or the undeniably fascinating culture that seems to produce such rash, risky behavior. Qureshi is highly self-critical throughout, recognizing the absurdity of the situation of his having bet on his friend’s body to fail him physically -- perhaps even irreparably. The experience seems to have been unrelentingly hellish for Qureshi (who turns 21 this year), and he writes with the self-awareness and perspective that belies his young age (and which he appears to have been lacking when he agreed to the prop).

Near the conclusion Qureshi speculates about “the world of poker players” in which he has lived for a short time, wondering if perhaps there is something “fundamentally unhealthy” present there of which all should be wary. It’s not a new observation he is making. But perhaps it is being made in a new way here -- and from a different perspective -- and thus might capture the notice of some it might not otherwise have gained.

People complain about the overuse of the term “sick” to describe risky maneuvers at the poker table or the awe-inspiring exploits of some of the games’ most celebrated “degens.” Qureshi’s account perhaps invites us to reconsider the term’s applicability to “the world of poker players,” including considering its possibly literal significance for some who inhabit it.