Posts Tagged ‘poker cheating’

Sorel Mizzi opens up about Cheating Incidents

Monday, December 31st, 2012

Sorel Mizzi doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in the poker world. He was caught buying somebody else’s account deep in a tournament at Full Tilt Poker, and let a friend use his account during a PokerStars tourney because he had to catch a flight. And while these acts don’t exactly measure up to the UB Poker superuser scandal, they did earn Mizzi a tarnished reputation.

He’s had trouble living this rep down over the past few years too. But Mizzi seems to be more at peace with himself these days and blogged about it on his website. While it’s a pretty long post, one interesting excerpt reads as follows:

Several incidents of being robbed, cheated and wronged had made me cynical, cold, distant and emotionally disconnected. The thought of people accusing me of exactly what I had been a victim to was unbearable. Poor me, no one understands, no one cares, I can’t trust anyone.

In fact, whenever I chose to trust someone, subconsciously I wanted them to disappoint me so I could reinforce my beliefs that no one could be trusted! I wasn’t happy about the person I became. I thought I had self-respect but upon further self-evaluation, I realized I didn’t.

As you can tell from the post, Sorel Mizzi also claims to have been cheated himself plenty of times. And while poker cheating is inexcusable in any case, at least it’s a little more understandable why Mizzi would turn to such acts.

Even when not bending the rules in his favor, the Canadian has always been a very successful poker player. He’s earned an impressive $4,661,968 in live tournaments, which includes a 2012 WPT Vienna High Roller win and a 2011 WPT Paris High Roller title. Plus he’s made millions more in online poker tournaments over the years.

Matt Marafioti accused of Poker Cheating Conspiracy

Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

With over $2 million in live poker tournament winnings and an impressive online poker resume, Matt Marafioti is widely considered one of the better pro players out there. However, the Canadian’s name has been dragged through the mud over the past couple of days after an alleged Skype conversation between him and another player was leaked on the TwoPlusTwo forums.

The 2p2 thread begins with a posted Skype conversation (sent to poster via email) between Marafioti and a Swedish online poker player named Samar Rahman. This already leads people to jump to conclusions because Rahman has been accused of cheating players such as Patrik Antonius in the past through elaborately-placed computer viruses. But things get worse when the conversation alludes to hacking into other players’ accounts so Marafioti and Rahman can see opponents’ hole cards.

Seeing as how it’s possible to manipulate a Skype conversation before posting it to the internet, it’s tough to verify 100% accuracy in this matter. However, most people in the TwoPlusTwo thread feel Marafioti and Rahman’s conversation about cheating other players follows a realistic flow for an IM conversation.

Perhaps more damning are the character issues here because both Marafioti and Rahman are pretty questionable people. Marafioti has gained quite a bit of attention for his melodramatic twitter posts and incessant cursing while Rahman is rumored to be a skilled computer hacker – as mentioned before.

Of course, none of this is evidence that these two online poker pros definitely conspired to cheat people. However, it is worth mentioning that the TwoPlusTwo thread has been kept up, which means they either feel there is some validity behind the accusations or – at the very least – they believe the topic is worthy of discussion.