What a way to ensure sales, insult your target first.

I was also PMed by Johnny. I'm proud of it and thanked him for his efforts. A lot of old school poker heroes we would know nothing about wasn't it for Johnny.

While that may well be true, that doesn't make Johnny any less insane, today.

Free Johnny. ffs. Free Johnny.

When some of the most reasonable, logical, compassionate, and tolerant mods on 2+2 agree that someone is more effort than they're worth, well, probably not gonna happen.

I don't like to call Johnny a charity case but he might be a charity case worth saving.

A nice guy telling unheard gambling stories and shot down by unpaid internet troll mods. He had tons of fans

He's been a charity case for a long time. If you don't think people (mods and others) have tried to save him, well, then I guess I'm asking you to take my word for it.

Actually he was banned by one of the people who get a paycheck.

But don't let facts influence you. Continue to fight the good fight against troll mods, good sir!

Clueless troll itt.

And I will take your word for it.

I was a fan myself but.......

SGT, would you please share a little more about what Johnny H did to receive his ban? From the outside he just seemed like a man who had lived through a lot and liked to tell stories and share history. Many pros have corroborrated stories told by Johnny H, so he didn't appear to be making false claims.

I too have received PMs from him. One was in regard to his book, while another was him talking about being banned. I did remember at the time wondering how he was able to PM if he was banned.

I can't give full details without violating his privacy.

Suffice it to say he started a campaign ranting against some people and started abusing the post report function to facilitate this, despite efforts by people who know him, including Mason I believe, to get him to stop. He wouldn't stop.

And yeah he PMed several people saying he was banned several weeks before it actually occurred. I got one myself, and told him he wasn't banned. This didn't appear to get through to him, though.

His stories had nothing to do with his banning. I've said in the past that while I wasn't a fan myself, I knew (as all the mods did) that others appreciated them so he was allowed to do his thing. Sadly, doing his thing eventually included actions that no forum poster would be able to get away with forever, although he certainly got away with it longer than most.

Actually all the spam PMs are enough of a reason for a ban, and that was not even a consideration.

Any of you who think Johnny should have been given another chance, or that we should have given him some leeway because he told good stories - that's exactly what had been going on for months, if not years. Over the last year he had fallen into a pattern of taking any post that was slightly critical of anything he said and making it personal, often blowing it up into a major drama. Many of his threads started by anyone else would have been locked or deleted instantly. Mods let a lot of stuff go because they knew that Johnny had a fan base that enjoyed his stories. The post reports and PMs towards the end got stranger and stranger, and there was no reasoning with him.

He's certainly been an interesting character here, and he may have been a great guy (hard to say only reading his posts), but he just pushed things too far in the end. I certainly hold no ill will towards him, and wish him the best.

Fair enough all around SGT and Bobo Fett. Thank you both for shining a little more light on everything. I can appreciate why you both don't want to re-open everything, but when two of the most reasonable people on here are both saying similar things (i.e. that there was a lot of annoying behavior behind the scenes that was given ample opportunitiy to stop based upon his notoriety) it can just about be taken as gold. Hopefully Johnny Hughes turns things around in time.

Yeah, if there's something wrong with him, I'd rather not see a thread with people piling on, and if there isn't, he probably doesn't deserve the attention. Not that I don't understand why people would want to know some details, of course.

Sad anyway. And tragic.

And we don't have that many poker historians.

RIP

Calling him a charity case is being, well, charitable. I'd use another term ending with case.

Based on what he said about me publicly at the end of the time here and the private messages from him that people have posted, I'm guessing I was one of the people he ranted about.

The most troubling thing to me was he would post lies about people that he seemed to believe. That shows some kind of break from reality and made me sad.

Hopefully, it's a case of some med he took becoming ineffective and it being able to be corrected.

If the private messages I received from people asking me if the rumors are true are based on private messages they received from Johnny, I'd tell them to consider the source and his behavior. If you do that, you'll have a definitive answer.

85% chance of delusional paranoia IMO, and 15% chance of actual cheating. I would be interested to know who he thought was cheating though.

WTF does this mean? It's 1/2. Sure, they pull $1 for the drop and that sucks but aside from that it's 1/2. You buy in for 100bbs and some people buy in short. Not sure what kind of awesome structure he is expecting in a 1/2 game.


One of the following must be true:

a) small sample size
b) his trips are long
c) he plays like a super nitty nit nit
d) he really is delusional

Tbh im surprised doc hasnt driven a few more people over the edge

Hell, NVG in general. It's been the ruin of too many good sane men.

One of my many failures.

This is a quote from a ATF thread from SGT RJ -- his name is in colors, so I guess he works for 2+2.

These are some posts from the last thread he was OP in. This seems like the right approach to ban the old guy for ranting and abusing the post report facility. Obviously, it would be wrong to remove trolling posts or ban the trolls.