So finally decided to post something publicly about this because I believe I’ve reached the end of road in terms of getting real info from Zo. Nothing will really change anything, but at the very least it will realign some sense of sanity in the world for myself by putting this out there. At the same time, this is a somewhat embarrassing story to tell because when it’s laid out there were definitely red flags and just basic unprofessional habits that should have kept me away from being at risk in this situation before it blew up.
Most of you don’t know me, but I am a regular in the 2p2 Marketplace and a relative newcomer to the whole MTT scene (starting in 2014 basically) despite being a live cash game pro for the better part of a dozen years.
I staked Zo from August 2015 through March 2017 with the conditions being that I had all live MTT action up to $1675 or the proportional amount of $1675 in a bigger buy-in, unless agreed to otherwise. In the end, our average buy-in was just under $860 in 268 entries. He never cleared makeup at any point.
There are tons of unprofessional anecdotes and red flags that I could go into, but I’ll just go into the main chunk of my story:
In March 2016, Zo final tabled the $2K Bay 101 prelim, where he had a $32K score, of which 70% was on stake, all of which went toward makeup, so he had ~$23K of my cash on him. In early April 2016, a few short weeks later, I suddenly receive a message from Zo telling me he had just lost his backpack at the airport traveling from Pittsburgh on the way to Borgata. According to him, all of my money was inside. Long story short, it was never recovered, according to Zo.
It was at this point, Zo revealed to me that he was pretty much broke. In addition to his own money he claims he lost in the backpack, he had nothing significant left in the bank (<$5K) nor any savings or income sources to repay my cash immediately. None of his friends could give him a loan to cover any part of this debt to me. In his responses at the time, he thought it was absurd I would assume otherwise.
Looking back, I could have definitely done a lot better due diligence and asked for bank statements and signed documents confirming he could cover any cash he was carrying on him. I did make a stipulation in our original deal, he couldn’t have more than $25K (lol) on him at any time. At the same time, if you know Zo, he has a confidence/ego about him that tries to make any questioning of him seem like it’s an absurd thing, e.g. he would brag about holding $100K of his former backer’s money with no issues. So at the time I just didn’t think a guy like him would stupidly be carrying around case money in a backpack and then lose it in an airport bathroom. Silly me.
I was obviously livid and definitely had my doubts. I have screenshots of Zo's activity on Twitter during the first couple hours after notifying me, including replying “pics or didn’t happen” at some model. It seemed fishy for someone to be doing that after losing case money, but through a combination of things including my naivete, my own confidence in my rep as a regular 2p2 marketplace MTT action buyer (I was a minor victim of the
Ben Warrington scam and went after it publicly), and Zo’s personality/reputation and the friends he seemed close to, I mostly believed this was a very unfortunate situation and at worst, a case of a lazy/weed-smoking poker player royally screwing up. Not someone who was trying to straight up steal from me.
Now, it was a question of how best to proceed. A couple other people told me I should just end things right there and hope to create a payment plan, though all of them told me it was unlikely I would ever see a dime back. But again, for the reasons listed above and maybe the degen inside of me hoping that Zo was due to go on a run and I’d get the debt back sooner, I decided to continue our stake, but add an extra 25% of every buy-in to our makeup number where the debt amount would eventually be doubled, i.e. eventually a max $23K extra makeup added on stake (unless debt paid down prior to that), and $23K straight debt owed separately. Plus I told Zo he could never carry that much of my cash on him anymore. I thought this was a fair deal and Zo agreed to it.
In the month or so immediately after the backpack incident, Zo actually “paid back” ~$3500 in the form of buy-ins he fronted, but nothing since. The debt has stood at $19556 for almost a year now. All of that extra makeup was added to the stake, but we ended the stake before I saw any benefit from that agreement (which Zo recently was happy to point out was my own decision). In the meantime, we actually earned a $1700 in tourney profits, with the high actually being $24K in profit before I quit the stake. Our makeup stood at $52778 (with the added makeup).
The main reason I quit the stake was because of this: Zo had a propensity (strategy?) to fire everything and go as hard as possible, especially on small buy-in re-entry events to try and spin up stacks. As pointed out to me from other MTT pros, it’s not out of the question with high variance styles/structures. But he pretty much fired max bullets to the last half dozen or so events in one month (including 15 bullets in a $570, the last event I staked him in) and went from that $24K profit peak post-backpack (after an HPT Colorado FT) back down to only $1700 profit post-backpack. I just decided I had enough.
At this point, I chalked up this 1.5 years with Zo as a relatively bad investment, mostly due to the $20K outstanding debt he owed, but nothing too much more sketchy than that. Of course I had my doubts about the backpack incident as I mentioned and there were tons of unprofessional stories with Zo’s habits (e.g. slow paying and questionable accounting) and his personality (e.g. stubborn/never apologetic), and was always somewhat curious about how he managed to get by through that year being supposedly broke (assumed his more successful poker friends helped him out). But after I quit the stake, I just put it out of my mind, just hoping Zo would bink something big and be able to pay me off at some point in the future. Not much else I could expect.
But then this news of him overselling the 2017 Main Event came out and it made me question and scrutinize everything. The timing of losing his backpack soon after a significant final table and the timing of busting $24K in buy-ins sooner after another one definitely took on a different perspective now.
I went to Zo directly and asked him what was going on and he was very vague and combative/defensive to say the least, especially for a person just outed to have scammed his closest poker friends. As his main staker for 1.5 years, I asked him the very reasonable, professional request for a player’s audit from every casino we played at for the last 1.5 years, just starting with the main ones like Rio, Venetian, Seminole Hard Rock, etc. He was not very receptive to this idea and kept offering alternative options (e.g. pics of faded receipts from over a year ago). After repeated prompts for updates (he never took the initiative to update me or reach out at ANY point of this) and me telling him I already received an audit back myself, he finally sent me one screenshot of a supposed WSOP audit from 2016.
And just from that one picture (photoshop, anyone?) there was already one discrepancy. I have an event played in my spreadsheets (confident in accuracy), scrolled back in our texts to confirm he says he played and busted (even says brief HH), yet it wasn’t on this supposed WSOP audit. I guess he will just chalk this up to being the Rio’s error.
He has thus far refused/ignored my requests for the actual WSOP audit email to be forwarded to me and has stopped returning my texts.
In the meantime, I have found out these other facts/anecdotes regarding my situation, confirmed by speaking to others involved from this summer:
—Zo owes upwards of $150K total at this point, before accounting for undiscovered phantom bullets/loans/pieces of action/overselling. No one really knows where the money is. He claims to have none of it, despite repeatedly telling me he just pays his bills and lives a relatively simple life (untrue based on anecdotes from close friends). So not sure how I was ever going to get paid back or what priority I would’ve had anyway, given some of his closest poker friends were scammed.
—Zo claimed to me that the Tumi backpack he lost with my money in it was the biggest purchase of his life in years, but his close friends have told me he already had purchased another Tumi backpack soon after the incident despite being broke.
—I once transferred Zo $12K within 2 weeks leading up to a series of events (with no events in between) and when he arrived at the first event, he had $0 on him and asked his friends for a loan. He claims he needed to just get to a BoA. Taken alone, it could just be laziness, but based on what is known now, it’s a bit different.
—Zo has made thinly veiled threats that those who “out” scammers usually don’t get paid back.
Anyway, that’s a lot of stuff, but I’m about to puke on my keyboard from re-living all this stuff. If anyone else has any more info of action bought from August 2015 through March 2017, I have all my records we can cross reference. While I didn’t have 100% of every event, especially >$1675 buy-ins, maybe Zo sold to enough corners of the poker world that this overselling incident wasn’t a one time thing as he claims it to be. I, for one, am definitely convinced I’m owed more than the $19556 he admits to.
