Tried to slowpay me for 40% of my whole Aussie Millions and was likely freerolling me. Also took forever when doing intersite transfers. Also anyone saying he is a good MTT player has to be smoking crack. He's awful.

If you read this Shak I hope you get AIDS and die you scummy piece of ****.

chance he didn't oversell to some of those events is also incredibly small. list of victims is endless if you check Facebook sheez.. will make a list of all action I bought and %s and others can post if they had pieces there too.. sigh

I had 1% of Dublin (if he went)... And he offered Aussie, but I passed.

don't want to state it like a fact when I don't have confirmation yet but I'm confident the chance he didn't scam me somehow (not play and still keep money, oversell then punt, etc) is incredibly low.

same story here with my Dublin package.

Feel like my stars display picture is a little distasteful now.



disclaimer: I've had it since September.

I guess it’s probably a good time for me to post here as well. I’m Chris, the guy who called him out on our local poker forum that was linked in the OP. I had a post ready for 2p2 as well, but was using that as leverage vs Shak to get him to pay back some of the people he owed. Obviously I couldn’t rightfully ask people to not post here, so it was a matter of time before it made its way. I’ll give a bit of my story with Shak, like Jstclkdabtn did.

Shak messaged me before WCOOP in 2014. I had just had a SMil FT and was wanting to buy action of some of the guys I knew playing. I didn’t know Shak, but he had guys vouch for him and his graphs looked decent. He sent me a schedule and I bought a small piece. He never followed that schedule, instead swapping events around or completely skipping others. It didn’t seem like a huge issue, and at the end we squared up. The same thing happened with SCOOP 2015, but much smaller overall dollar amount. It was always super strange that he would pick totally random events to keep all his own action in (and usually cash those).

We chatted a lot. He was definitely way ahead of me in poker skill, and I was learning lots about the game. He helped me in spots I was unsure of and over time we became friends. I learned about his Reddit past, and discussed it with him. It seemed as he was a young kid who made a mistake, and he had turned the corner. He won the SMil, and then won LAPT Panama a month later. I was happy for him. Our entire community, even those who often despise him, seemed to be happy for his success.

We planned to travel to EPT Barcelona together. Since I’m the more accomplished (life, not poker) and grown up person, I took care of the accoms on my credit card, and he agreed to pay me back afterwards. This is where my headaches began. Shak has absolutely zero respect for the cost of things or the value of anything. I have never seen someone run a tab to over 300 euro - on the mini fridge. Without drinking alcohol. I mean, there was a store across the street that would sell him the same items for 1/4 the cost, but that meant getting up or pre planning. He sold me a bunch of action of him playing 50/100 NLHE in Barca, and hit an upswing so owed me at the end. He had apparently bought action of a well known reg in the 25k, so I split that with him. Still have no idea if we owned that action. When we left Barcelona, he owed me about 10k CAD. Getting this money from him was worse than having teeth pulled. There was always an excuse. Always a delay. His favourite deferral with me was to parlay the debt into action, either on him or on someone else. This never really sat well with me, because I knew how flaky he was with schedules.

Eventually I started to see some of my money back, and as we approached the DSPT Championship in Calgary, he still owed me about half. I’d have to check records to be sure. He wanted to buy some of my action, so I told him he had to pay up or too bad. He missed deadline on first bullet, but got me most of it before my second. He was almost paid in full when i fired the 3rd, so I floated the bit he had left. I made a deep run, and deducted the balance from his share. However, he literally stalked me to the cash cage. Being that we were friends, it didn’t strike me as super odd, but he literally did not let me out of his sight, and was demanding his money instantly. I was going to **** with him and keep it for the next few months, but I didn’t have that chance.

Right after this, I start planning for EPT Dublin and working to get the funds that I needed. Shak binks the 2k side event at Prauge, and tells me he has a piece of the 25k winner so he has LOADS of euros he can get me. I’m worried, because I know how slow he is, but we have about 7 weeks so I send him some CAD. He misses about 30 deadlines and has every excuse in the book on why he can’t send me the money. This is where I start to piece everything together very clearly. I had suspicions, but this is where it all became clear he was essentially running a ponzi scheme to pay back his debts. He went as far to tell me that he had contacted his “backer” and was getting him to send for his Dublin package so he could pay me the money he owed. This was about 10 days before I had to leave. No money came. He tells me that he’s receiving all the funds from Prague a week before I leave. No money came. I personally WATCHED him win 20k online playing HU PLO. No money came. I sold off the action he had bought from me in Dublin as I was boarding my plane to London, and that literally saved my trip.

In the last week before my trip, he had told me 3 times he was sending the money, twice that it was actually sent, and that he had won/received in the range of 100-150k on stars. It was all complete bull**** designed to keep me from calling him out, because he knew I wasn’t just threatening. There is very little in this world I hate more than liars and thieves.

I had no idea how deep this was. Like most people, I thought he was just lazy/slow and he would pay eventually. The money didn’t hurt my life in any manner other than causing me stress. If I had known just how many people he was owing money to, I would have brought this out a lot sooner.

We can speculate all we want on if he was scamming people or not, but at the end of the day our current running tally is north of 300k. Given his history, it seems pretty clear to me that he was. It’s truly scary how many of us walk amongst each other all the time, how many of us play at the same table and yet we had no idea. I was sitting around waiting for a 1k to start in Dublin the morning after I posted my thread on our forum. I overheard someone complaining about being owed a large sum by “Shak”. When I asked if he was talking about Shak from Calgary, his head fell in despair. I don’t know how far or how deep this goes, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind it was intentional. He knew what he was doing. He was doing it on purpose. It may have started out small, but it turned into a total different beast.

I once called Shak my friend.

I often defended him, and tried to help him overcome his social issues. Tried to help him be a better, more likeable person. The stories about him berating people and being a complete douche bag are often true. I guess that should of been one of the biggest warning signs for all of us. His complete lack of respect for anyone.

I no longer call Shak my friend. I’m have shame that I ever did.

While it was difficult to hit post on my initial thread, I can honestly say it’s one of the best things I have done in a long while. The stress is gone, and his days of scamming people are over.

Footnote - I can confirm he was NOT in Dublin. I can also pretty much assure everyone he was overselling/punting/not playing events he was selling for. I've had someone send me a package schedule for Barca that I know he didn't play, which was totally different from package schedule I bought.

Errrmmmm... Shak I'm disappointed if Dublin was a scam to get a little bit of money to punt those push/fold cash games on 888. Please ship back my 1%...

an admin told me to pass this on: if you are a victim, on Facebook find and join shak scam (private group). mostly to discuss some potential plans etc that shouldn't necessarily be public or viewable to shak, you need to be vouched for as legit to be approved but pretty easy process. plz do it, thx

Gg you fat ****. I'll likely write a more in depth commentary later. I'm sorry to anyone that I may have involved shak into your life.

Gosh, must be such an exhausting life to chase money and avoid repayements like that. I'll rather be 100% broke than living like that.

Total debt is up to 300k CDN so far, also it has come to light he gets people to lower their markup for him since he is such a friend then resells that action elsewhere at a markup.

Kid has been scamming people since his video game days of Diablo 2. It has been going on for years and years. He is not sorry, he is just ashamed he is getting outted and caught at the moment.

Is he a 2+2 member? Screename? Post history?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/members/425316/

In the same boat, have bought small pieces on all of his packages and he has never cashed in a single mtt

Sounds like there's a need for a crowd-sourced centralized ledger to track player to player transactions to mitigate this situation proactively instead of reactively. It could include tournament registration confirmation, debt tracking, other factors related to credit risk such as overselling, delayed payments, and bounced checks.

I highly doubt most legitimate professional poker players want all of their transactions and action publically tracked and so easily accessible as records to all. It's not a bad suggestion, but I wouldn't trust such a service with all of my financial details from poker.

Lol, good thread derail. I wonder if Swoop still stands by his legitimately nicest guys in poker comment. Jstclk, just own to the fact you were a huge douche on reddit after Shak won the Sunday Million, and not just to this dude. You were pumped about the win, but those posts were probably the worst way to go about it.

When you start treating poker as a business and engaging in such activities, you should treat it as a business. This is exactly why Shak and others can get away such exploitation. If it's government oversight you're worried about then your accounting practices are suspect. If it's something else, I'd call that ignorance.

Derail gets deleted immediately when a mod sees it (one would imagine), and lol @ your logic of a single r/poker thread containing multiple antagonistic parties informing the conclusion you made. Make this man a justice of the supreme court.

Just off the bat, how about preventing less closely related family and friends finding out how much you make? People get very weird when it comes to fiscal matters. There's a reason people will keep lottery wins a secret.

Prevents Uncle Marty from seeing you bought 20% of Joe McKeehen in the WSOP Main event and asking for $50,000 for an excellent business idea. Or more sinister things somebody could do with that information about your finances.

Most people like their privacy. I agree that privacy hides the shadows where scammers like Shak lurk. But if you can't see why people would have legitimate reasons for wanting privacy, then I'd call *that* ignorance.

This would actually be relatively simple to do, and still keep anonymous until a point in time when people needed to be not anonymous. It could be totally voluntary as well, and would honestly lead to a better marketplace because you can get realistic tracking of players ROI.

Ex; you sign up and get assigned a user ID #. If you get called into contention, you can post your user #to back up your events played.


I know I would personally be interested in buying way more action than I do, it's just such a risky and often difficult venture. I don't get to play as much as I want, but it's fun to follow along with a sweat.

I absolutely do. Daniel can be let's say abrasive at times both online and at the table but he's one of the best people i've met playing poker, and I would literally trust him with 100% of my net worth. I can probably only say that about a single digit number of people.

He doesn't get along with everyone including some of my other friends. That's irrelevant. In this thread, he and at least dozens of other people are the victims of Shak scamming people (possibly including myself for a small amount as I took a small share of some of Shak's packages that may have contained phantom bullets). Let's not derail an important thread.

The entire derail should be deleted, and thread move on towards figuring out exactly how much Shak owes and to who

When I get time sometime this week i'll look over my skype logs with Shak and stars xfer history to see if it's likely i've been scammed or not - if I have I assume the dollar number is smaller than most others. For what its worth I checked my Skype logs recent history with him and after 3 weeks of no contact on Feb 11 Shak offered to sell me $180 worth of action in 'a girl he knows whos good' in some Canadian series. I passed, he didn't give me the player's name. He also tried to take a piece of my Aussie Millions last month but I was sold out.

For those who don't know there a separate post in the Facebook group for simply this, tracking who he owes and what amount.

If Shak owes you $$ please make a post stating the amount or if you want to remain anon let the guy running it know in a pm and he will just post the amount.

That's definitely fair and I can respect your opinion of him, but maybe "nice" wasn't the best adjective to use. He might be completely honest and trustworthy, but that's not the same as being one of the nicest guys around. I hope everyone gets what's owed to them, but this is looking bleak.