I've asked for the previous post with this title to be removed a handful of times now and been asked by the owner of the site, Mat Sklansky, to email one of the "green moderators" to remove the post. The only moderator capable of doing so is ChicagoRy, and he has told me he can't. He has so far refused four requests to do so, and i've now made the final request for him to remove it. The post serves absolutely no purpose by remaining on these boards, but ChicagoRy feels that because certain people spent time and effort responding that it should remain forever more.

For the record, Roy did spend a lot of time with me before I paid any money and I think for the right people in the right circumstances he would be a great coach. My misgivings were personal and obviously don't affect other people and I expected too much. He is obviously a big contributor to the poker community and I regret that our dispute was aired publicly.

Botnic

This is the thread in question: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/10...layer-1146877/

I locked the thread awhile back when you requested it be deleted.

I explained to you that the thread would not be deleted because many contributing community members took the time to respond at your request, and just because they disagree with your original post requesting a refund, does not mean that the thread can just go away.

You called me unreasonable and accused me of giving you the runaround, when I've spent at least 12 paragraphs explaining to you the above over weeks of your PMs to me.

I also offered to delete any bits of personal information that might be in the thread, as you said there were lots, and when I requested post #s you kept giving me posts that had zero personal information within them.

We'll let this thread stay up too, and if anybody has any opinion or view that they want to post here, feel free to. Just don't be too mean to Botnic (or myself) please.

Also, to avoid any confusion, since people like to call me Roy a lot on 2p2 (I'm Ryan):

ChicagoRy in OP = Me as moderator.

Roy in OP = A person named Roy who coached OP (see link at the top of my post).

I am not happy with what Chicagory arbitrarily removes and refuses to remove either. IMO he appears to show a big bias towards the coaches. I notice he is a coach himself.

Yea, I mean you're just unhappy that we disagree about your (biased and attacking in MY opinion) nature in the Systematic Drills thread, and that I haven't deleted the comments from people (including myself) that air their opinion of your posts in that thread.

And I understand that you would be mad by that, but I do not understand why you have it out so much for that one coach. And it wasn't just me, it was 4+ others in that thread that agreed that you looked very attacking in nature and unfair to that coach.

So if that makes me a coach sympathizer, that's fine. I spent a lot of time trying to get that Breatheweapon guy to pay people back, talking to him via PM and so on. I also have moved rather vague, sometimes even attack like criticisms of coaches into this forum for the community to review, rather than deleting the posts (I usually only delete things that are way over the line of attack and that contain no real evidence or verified facts, IE if you say "THIS COACH SUCKS LOL HE CANT BEAT 200NL" and the coach has a winning 200NL graph up, I would delete it... if you say "THE COACH HAS FAKE 200NL RESULTS UP, SCAMMER" without details, I would probably move it in this forum, tell the coach and monitor what happens from there.)

I actually care about this forum and coaching and students though. To call my decisions arbitrary is an insult and outright false, especially given your attack filled posts in this forum.

So just to be clear:

- Botnic doesn't get posts deleted when he criticizes a coach publicly, asks for a refund and the community (including yourself) disagree with his claims.

- You don't get posts that call you biased and unfair to a coach deleted, especially considering the posts are not hateful at all.

- YourDoom, nor TiT received deletions on the criticisms of their coaching threads in the coaching advice forum. In fact, unsubstantiated claims were moved into this forum for the community to review, rather than being deleted, as we really want to avoid another scam from happening.

Now, do you think I'm truly biased or are you just biased yourself in your assessment of my decision making in this forum?

Firstly you should respect Botnic's right to privacy and remove the other thread. He made it very clear that he did not want this private matter discussed in public and the coach was very unethical in posting the details. It is very disappointing when coaches fail to respect the confidentiality of the client-coach relationship.

Your point of view is that it is perfectly ok to claim that a poster is "having a go" if they disagree with the views of the OP. Can't you see that this is personal and just destroys the discussion ? If you can't because you are on OP's side then you're biased. If you further remove posts on this basis you're very biased. I have had no explanation for the removal of many of my reasonable-looking responses and yet you will not remove posts which are personal against me because you have decided to take sides.

- I offered to delete any personal information Botnic shows me in his thread. He instead, asked me to delete posts that said things like "I disagree with Botnic, he should not receive a refund." That is not personal, nor worthy of deletion.

- Botnic wants me to delete his entire thread. He created a thread asking the community if he deserves a refund, the coach defended himself and the community agreed. If the community had agreed with Botnic, he would not request deletion. And if the coach had requested deletion, I would tell him the same thing.

- I deleted posts of yours, this is true. But I also deleted posts of the people flaming you on the other side ("my side" as you say). You were looking for any reason to cut down the poster of a helpful thread and people got angry when you did that. You got into it with a few posters, and all those posts, on both sides of the issue, were deleted. They derailed a thread.

- Just because I posted in the thread does not mean I'm taking a side. I didn't tolerate the comments that called you a hater in the thread, even though I personally believe they were accurate, I thought it was clear that you were taking responses out of context and manipulating them to attack a coach you seem to have a personal beef with. But even though I believed the hater comments towards you were accurate, I still deleted them. Why? Because they derailed the thread and that bothers users in this forum. I don't really care if they are accurate, this isn't a news forum or a truth forum, it's a coaching discussion forum.

I know it can sometimes be difficult to understand and have a wider perspective, but I'm afraid you've come in here thinking you can attack a coach in one of the more helpful posts of this forum, engage with posters that disagree with you, then hope to have any post critical of you deleted (when the attack posts against you were already deleted).

You are completely missing Botnic's and my point. Botnic did not want this discussed in personal terms at all and he was quite explicit in this. The coach insisted on personalising the discussion in a shamefully unethical manner. The thread should be deleted to respect Botnic's right to privacy.

You are completely wrong if you think that my posts were an attack on the OP. I disagree with the overblown claims he repeats in his opening thread (which are not supported by the science) and noted that this thread was accompanied by a thread in the coaching forum so it was not totally altruistic. As for the contents of the opening thread I was genuinely trying to develop the discussion on useful drills and how time should be spent efficiently to improve. As a mod it is not your place to accuse other posters and rubbish them and remove their posts on your own personal whim. You should follow the same objective criteria for the removal of posts regardless of who wrote them and whether or not you agree with the views expressed. You do not do this. In order to get you to remove posts which are personal against me they must be "hateful" but you will happily remove fairly innocuous posts from me if they challenge the views of the thread opener.


PS Being honest in one's criticism does not make one a "hater" but it might make one a better poker player.

I told you before and I'll say it again, I deleted off topic posts and insults from both yourself and people that I actually agreed with. Neither posts had any place in that thread and they were deleted.

Pontylad, for example, made a post saying "haters gonna hate" to one of your more pointed posts. I deleted his post (along with a few others of his that were critical of you).

As a moderator, when users are fighting or making accusations, I do sometimes step in, both as a mod and as a poster, to either make deletions/moderation or to insert my own opinion in here (as one of the few people that probably reads all of these threads, I do post my views in some instances, particularly ones where there is conflict/arguing).

As for your views on HomeyG's training drills thread... if scientific evidence were required to make a helpful thread, a great deal of the best threads on 2p2 would vanish (and if we hold your posts to the same standard as HomeyG's, you don't present scientific evidence either...).

The thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/10...-nlhe-1107105/

The OP of that thread recommends a lot of things that many successful professionals in this game also recommend in similar or exact ways.

Anyways, don't take my word for it, here's what the community members in this forum had to say about your posts:



And here are what more community members said about HomeyG's thread, after they read your posts:

I fail to see how he has the right to privacy, why that right is relevant to this issue, why it is the responsibility of 2+2 to defend that right, why it was unethical for the coach to wish to publicly discuss a matter that effected himself, why you think that there is necessarily some level of confidentiality involved in "the client-coach relationship", and what you think that level of confidentiality is.

Could you explain these things?

The client-coach relationship is a confidential business arrangement. If personal details which identified Bornic irl had remained on this site or Botnic could be identified irl then Botnic would have had legal redress against the coach according to UK law. Unfortunately our moderator Chicagory has little understanding of the concepts of privacy and not abusing other forumists. He has called me a "hater" on this thread and has disclosed the contents of Botnic's PMs to him. The "P" in PM stands for PRIVATE. I have come to the conclusion that most of what I post just whizzes over his head as he fails to show any understanding of it.

Jesus you've missed the point again. It is the following and the claims that arise from it that are not supported by the scientific evidence :

"As documented by a slew of recent books like Talent is Overrated, The Genius in All of Us, or Talent Code, all the research in the field of expertise and expert performance shows that world class performers in a variety of competitive fields (Ex: Tiger Woods in golf, Bobby Fischer in chess, Yo-Yo-Ma in music, etc.) reached their elite level by following essentially the same formula: obsessively maintaining 3-4 hours per day of “deliberate practice” over a number of years...."

Homey has obviously read the books but refused to engage in any discussion about the overblown claims made in them. He justs seems to accept them as Gospel regardless of evidence or lack thereof.


It's your job as the mod to moderate the trolls so we can have a meaningful discussion. Unfortunately you seem to be on their side and even repeat some of the abusive stuff you should be modding on here so we still haven't had a reasonable discussion. You and your mates more or less strangled it at birth with a lot of unpleasant personal remarks against me (which any decent mod would have removed). I see no further point in this discussion as either you appear to be too limited to understand what's being posted or you are too stubborn to address it sensibly.

Stating that this is so does not help me to understand. Please tell me why this is so.

2+2 isn't based in the UK. I don't understand why UK is important. Does the coach live in the UK?

This doesn't really make any sense as an answer to my questions. Can you take another look at my post and try again?

There are privacy laws protecting private data in the UK (where I live). Irrespective of this it is unethical and unprofessional to post the private details of others without their consent. If you have so little understanding of business and personal etiquette then that's your problem not mine. Incidentally the coach was not affected by Botnic's original post which was completely general.

I also live in the UK and I can tell you that those privacy laws are in no way relevant to anything that was posted in Botnic's post. Remember Botnic is just an anonymous username on a forum. Iirc he's not even in the UK anyway. He could be anyone from a random stranger to the Queen and we have no way of knowing.

I believe the coach posted identifying details to begin with which were removed by the mod and presumably 2 + 2 know who Botnic is irl as well. I don't know about you but I wouldn't trust a coach who blurted out all kinds of private and confidential stuff on forums.