This.

Anyone who played the kid 'prodigy' during the lock challenge and sauron on ipoker must agree that this person is not a world beater. Hate to suggest things without proof but i wonder if the skype strat convos were as authentic as seemed?!

I just think that the moral panic displayed, especially from poster tommyhawkers ITT, is silly.

If you're in a position where you have money you need to always be paranoid and take precautions. That comes with the ability of accumulating money long term. There are some standards and those standards needs to be followed. It doesn't matter how good friend someone is, you never show or talk about certain things.

Trust yourself and protect yourself as well as you can. Noone is allowed into the most inner of rings.

Staking requires extreme amounts of trust. Personally I would never consider staking anyone. Taking someone for their word when it comes to money is retarded. Everything needs to be written and confirmed.

It's like when you flip with a random person, it's the equivalent of accepting candy from strangers in my book.
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And the point I was raising in the first place is this:
It doesn't matter because the people who gets scammed are fish from a certain aspect. They learn not be fish the hard way. The more scams, the more people start protecting themselves. And then better scams will be created.

It all follows the same pattern of equilibrium and demand and supply, where raising the base of knowledge/awareness is primary, hitting or making deals with large networks of scammers secondary and then tertiary just letting survival of the fittest rule amongst the scammers themselves.

Some players reacted against Girah right off the bat, thinking it was some sort of scam by dogishead/jungleman12. They just smelled something fishy with the situation. If anything interesting comes from this situation, I'd dwelve into why you had several posters raising questions of suspicion when Girah first appeared.

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The whole Portugese poker prodigy thing was pretty obviously horse**** from the start, anyone with the slightest bit of cynicism/not completely naive could tell that. Imo the most important issues yet to be uncovered is: what exactly are the true roles of the other well known players in his story?

Basically wtf was this whole thing really about from the start.

**Paging Noah**

I dont think the story was all horse****. The advice he gave in hist posts was actually pretty good. And he was obviously a good player. Pretty shocking to see this. And i wonder what else is going on. I mean you dont ruin being sponsorsed and a good rep for 30k$?

Ok, HS players. Here's the question: How is it ethical for you to ghost one another and get advise against unsuspecting player during HU sessions?

How is it so standard that OP doesn't even try to disguise the fact? This means it's clearly prevalent behavior in the HS community.

How dare you complain about getting scammed when you yourselves spend your time cheating against people online? Ever think about that?

unless out of the $2M he made under his accounts, a large % had gone to his "backers" from his own play and also belonged to the backers when they logged in and played under his name.... therefore his real roll might be a lottttt less than people thought, and $30k therefore is a nice chunk of change.. for eg to any msnl grinder. and had he not been discovered this could've turned into $120k very easily, of which he would've pocketed 100%, as opposed to let's say 60% of it going to jungleman and dogishead.

^^^This. Should OP be iPoker banned too???

Don't forget ImFromSweden and TooCuriousso1 (cheaters, ghosting).

How are they getting away with this completely unscathed? What, so just because what Girah did was a more blatant form of cheating, these guys are going to get away with cheating?

Make no mistake, this is 100% cheating.

This is disgraceful. I echo the words of all who have said that this should not be tolerated and no matter what Jose claims to be willing to pay back that there is no coming back from doing something like this. He should be barred from the community and an example needs to be made for anyone thinking about doing anything like this in the future.

omg if i hadnt just read this in NVG i wouldnt belive it

It would appear that the confession isn't to be taken at face value, just received this PM (maxkatz1 is a real ipoker player):

Hey,

I'm maxkatz1 on ipoker and read the whole story today. Basically I had done some investigating after loosing to sauon1989 and Jose sweating me 3days in a row and was gonna post sth similiar. He also said sth about a nick on ongame and i kinda suspect its also one of his scam accounts.

.

un****ingbelievable!

I was gonna post this today... Jose scammed me for atleast 15k on ipoker.

On 28th of June I contacted Yoan Gaidov from hand4hand.net about coaching with Jose Maria Machedo, the so called portuguese poker prodigy. He gave me his Skype info and I added him. He said that he would talk with Jose and forward my information to him. He told me there was a waiting list of like 50 players.
On 29th of June he gave me Joses Skype info and I added him. From that day I would try to contact Jose about coaching. He would ignore me first but then after like 2 weeks we finally scheduled a session. I filled out his questionnaire and was good to go. He wouldnt show up to the first session and also missed the 2nd one we scheduled making up excuses. Then he apologized and said he would make it up by coaching me for free for 2 sessions.
On 07/17 we had finally our first session where we talked about some theory. The session was nothing special and I didn,t get the impression that he is as awesome as everyone seems to think he is. He basically send me the links to the hands he posted on 2p2 (also the hands he made his first video for pokerstrategy) and talked about them. He told me to prepare some conceptual hands and send me to him. I would do that but he never really analyzed them. He would then ignore me again for some days and when our next session was due he delayed it during to having so much stress because of his first video being released.
At this time I was playing almost only on pokerstars and partypoker. On 07/28 I would started playing on ipoker on my old account (maxkatz1) I haven't played there for a while. Jose knew my name there since he asked me on 07/17 about it and. All of a sudden Jose started to show an unreal amount of interest to sweating me. After bascially ignoring me for over 3 weeks and hardly doing anything that can be considered coaching he would suggest to sweat me up to 3-4 times a day starting on 07/31. I played up to 9 tables of 6 max on ipoker.

Basically he wanted me to play ongame or ipoker during our sweatsessions. He told me his nick on ipoker is toshisan. Pretty strange if you look it up on ptr - plays low - midstakes hu.
He told me that his ongame account was frozen and that he thinks that games on ongame are great so I should play there and asked me about what my nick there is.
Ok so now the fun part begins. After starting the sweatsession a guy named sauron1989 would sit with me at every table he could at 10-20. He would make some garbage plays (coldcall crap pf v me - make some stupid bluff) then type that he is tilted in chat and ask me to move up in stakes).
Jose told me that he played him for over 3k hands and that he thinks that sauron is a huge fish. He told me he lost like 15k to him at 25-50 but will play him again since hes got really good reads on him. He also encouraged me to start 10-20 games with sauron. I lost about 15 k to sauron on the 3 days where Jose did sweat me.
He would spazz here and there but other than that he was playing in god mode - calling every single bluff of mine. Jose tried to encourage me to play sauron hu and also asked why I won't play him at 25-50.
After sking him several times he finally agreed that I can sweat him and he played about 45 minutes on merge on his girah account. Before and after the session he was asking me again and again if he can sweat me. He was never really interested in analyzing any hands. I got suspicious after getting crushed by sauron 3 days in a row and asked a friend of mine (mdma) about his opinion. He told me that he has read some interesting stuff on a swedish pokerforum a while ago. Basically Jose asked an ipoker reg to sweat him when he played a fish hu. During that session he lost 8 buins or so on on 10-20. Guess to whom he lost? Sauron 1989!
Toshisan has not a single hand played v Sauron1989 according to ptr. Jose asked me to play Sauron from my account since hes getting no action from him. He asked me if he can sit in 4 handed with Sauron1989, me and geeforce1. I said sure but he wouldn't. Then telling me that his ipoker account is blocked cause Hasseeb logged in.
So it all looks pretty strange. First he ignores me and doesn't wann do any coaching. As soon as he sees me playing on ipoker he can't get enough of sweating me. As soon as I sit at ipoker Sauron sits at very table of mine at 10-20 with position and plays in godmode. His ongame account is blocked. His ipoker account is blocked. His moneybookers deposit limit is reached so he cant make a new account and deposit.