Serious questions have been raised about Lock poker's actions during the girah cheating scandal. They are set out here:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...nswer-1081663/

So far no one from Lock has responded. Would the Lock rep please go there and do so.

This is the OP of the thread fyi:

I am starting a new thread for this as the main girah threads are becoming very cumbersome and I thought it would be better to focus on this aspect seperately. Obviously if the mods don't agree or if there is already a seperate thread in another corner of 2+2 they can do what they want with this one.

The angle i want to explore further is Lock's role in the affair. Here is a summary for those who haven't followed this closely:

Lock appointed girah as a sponsored pro following the hype around him on 2+2 (which we now know was primarily generated by girah himself with the support of Haseeb and Jungleman). He immediately set about playing in the Bluff/Lock Poker Challenge which was essentially a contest to see who could make the most profit in a month. girah won the challenge. Shortly afterwards the following was posted on 2+2:

Quote:

Macedo has won the challenge earning over $104k during the month of April. I find this fascinating considering he was having a losing month according (to the article) with 2 days left. He had been largely playing no higher than 1k NL and as low as 400 NL. Then all of a sudden on the final day he goes on to play nosebleed stakes and wins enough money to be in first place.

For those that don’t know nosebleed stakes seldom if ever run on the Merge network. So what a coincidence that he was able to find a game at those stakes, on the final day, and not only win but win enough money to get into the lead.

Furthermore, the person against whom the bulk of the money was won was playing under the alias “SamChauhan”. If that is indeed Sam Chauhan of http://www.changingyou.com/, he is a mindset coach not a poker player. Never before have I heard of him playing online poker. Now he is playing against top opponents at nose bleed levels? What made him choose that particular day to all of a sudden start playing 20kNl? Another coincidence?

I believe Sam is from the US, so how did he manage to get so much money onto Merge in such a short period? A bank wire? After black friday? I had never seen him play there before and have not seen him since.

I happened to watch some of their match and it seemed that sam was playing very erratic and unconventional poker. Now I am not going to claim to even understand the thought process of high stakes players, but to me some of the hands that were played seemed very questionable.

Finally, my last coincidence involves a player named INEVERFOLDI. It is rumored that this player also lost quite a bit of money to Girah. I have never seen this player play heads up high stakes and he also happens to be from Portugal. INEVERFOLDI and Girah are the only two portuguese players I have ever seen play high stakes on Merge. Another coincidence?

For some reason the mods chose to delete the post soon afterwards (a bit of a fail as it was probably one of the most significant and insightful posts ever on the site).

In any case the cat was out of the bag and soon afterwards Lock disqualified girah (its not clear how much of a part the 2+2 post played in this). They made the following statement:

Quote:

Lock is disappointed to announce that their new LockPRO ELITE team member, Jose "Girah" Macedo has been disqualified. Runner up Michael "bigguylegend22" Drummond, who earned over $90,000 in profit during the challenge, will take the prize. In audits of all participants' accounts at the close of the competition, violations of BPC rules as well as the Merge Gaming network rules were discovered. The violations with Girah's account included computers at multiple locations logging in and playing on his account. Lock's philosophy is built on player relationship and trust; any violation of fairness by any player is taken very seriously.

"Jose is young and he has made a big mistake here. We wanted to make sure that regardless of being a LockPRO he won this fair and square. After doing an audit of his account we have found that he broke some rules and that will not be tolerated by Lock," said Jennifer Larson CEO/Owner of Lock Poker. "We pride ourselves in standing for trust, legitimacy and loyalty. The truth is sometimes hard to stand by but it is the only way we can move forward. Although José won enough money from his own IP to have legitimately won the challenge, the unfortunate fact remains that breaking the rules is strictly disallowed. The fact remains Jose is an exceptional player and I firmly believe that mistakes only lead to greatness if learned from."

"I'm deeply sorry for having broken the rules," said José, "but I truly had no intention of circumventing the rules in any way. Though it is no excuse, I want to be fully transparent at this point to let the poker world know what has happened and why. The computer in question was my backer, who logged into my account to check my balance and ended up playing some $25/$50 PLO while I was asleep and lost some money. Though on the merit of my own legitimate play I had enough winnings to win the Bluff Challenge, in light of the way things appear, I fully support and respect Lock's decision to disqualify me and hand over the challenge to the second place winner. Once again, I truly regret that all of this has happened the way it has, and I hope that I can win back the generous support and understanding of the players who have believed in me so far. I will be issuing a more comprehensive explanation of what happened on my blog. Thank you."

It has now become clear that the $100k won from the SamChauhan account was in fact just chipdumping by Haseeb. The win from the INEVERFOLDI account is also suspect. In addition, Haseeb has confirmed that he played on girah's account during the challenge (losing money playing at PLO).

The questions for Lock (which I hope their rep will come in and answer) are:

(1) Were you aware of the 2+2 claims before you DQ'd girah?
(2) Would you have done so were those claims not made/publicised?
(3) When you said in the statement "The violations with Girah's account included computers at multiple locations logging in and playing on his account." You used the word "included" implying that this was just one of several violations. What were the others?
(4) Were you aware of the chipdumping?
(5) If not aware then why not since (a) you had conducted an audit and (b) there were specific allegations about it? Also, when did you become aware since the issue was subsequently raised again on 2+2 (after you DQ'd him)?
(6) If you were aware then why didn't you say so in your statement and why did you say that he had won enough legitimately to win the challenge on his own?
(7) Who did you connect the SamChauhan account to?
(8) Why didn't you suspend or sack girah as a pro when you knew he had cheated?

There is an official statement at the top of this forum. As of right now that is the only comment I can make on this.

-Rizen

So, with all the crap going on with the scandal, all the concerns widespread through the poker community, all the questions about Lock's role, all Lock Poker has to say is:

Doesn't "building a deep relationship with our players" based on "trust, legitimacy and loyalty" involve being transparent and responsive when one of the major scandals ever to hit online poker blows up and your site was involved???

In fact, what do all those clever words mean if you can't even respond to obviously legitimate questions?

I posted before in one of the NVG threads, but it's buried among literally thousands of post about the Girah scandal, and it bears repeating.

Lock Poker, in their statement immediately after the the Girah disqualification, claimed that a) they audited Girah's account and b) that he won the competition legitimately.

At this time, we know b) to be completely false. Haseeb "DogIsHead" Qureshi admitted to dumping ~$100K into Girah's account. Which means a) either you didn't conduct an audit, as you claimed or b) you pretty much suck at auditing, since even a blind chimpanzee could catch a $100K chip dump at completely different stakes and vs. an opponent that never played.

So Lock Poker is either dishonest or incompetent. Either way, a full explanation and apology is in order, and you can bet I'll never put a dime onto your site, and will tell any player in any thread that I see asking about Lock the full story and discourage them from playing here if you are unable to own up to your mistakes.

The worst option, of course, is c: they conduct the audit, discover the scam, confront Girah/DIH, and agree to quiet it down to protect their investment and biggest star signing to date by only citing the MAing.

Very true. I simplified the options of course, this is also possible, but basically Lock is guilty of either extreme incompetence or extreme dishonesty. But you are 100% correct, I'd ninja edit my original post to include this if I could. I did include it in the below.

Also, Lock representative should be aware that I've started a thread in ATF calling the attention of the 2+2 management to the Girah scandal and requesting they rethink their relationship with your site.

Im not happy with lock's response!.... LONG story short ..i've played online since 04.........seen IT ALL! IN this day and age....wouldn't it be refreshing for one of these sites to come out and say..... "YES we F'd up" BUT here is what we are going to do about it! I have money on FT, I have money on EWX and I have money on QT. All that suxxxxx.......BUT one place I will NOT have money is LOCK poker. I have ONLY played there for a few months and withdrew because of this. Maybe someday I'll be back!!!!!!!!!!

Rizen-

It's time for Lock to release an actual statement about this matter. The truth hurts, but I'd advise Lock to release a factual statement otherwise players will continue to wonder about the integrity of your site. I currently play on Lock and was happy with the site, but this type of publicity will surely tarnish your site and player base. I hope Lock takes this matter seriously.

I agree. imo Lock could still come out of this looking okay if they are open, tell the truth, help the community to uncover the details of the cheating then explain what they are going to do to make sure any errors that Lock made in the affair are not repeated in future. We all make mistakes but how you deal with them is the most important thing. If Lock continues to just ignore the issue until they are backed into a corner (same strategy adopted by girah, haseeb then jungleman) they will end up looking much worse. I hope they choose the sensible path because we all want clean sites to play on.

Damn you Lock, now I am forced to play at Cake. We will not sit idly by while you do nothing and release no information. We want answers, complete transparency.

Does not compute. Cake is by far way more shady than lock. I'd reconsider your actions.

Lock and Merge could do such a huge service to the community in helping to uncover more truths about the scandal - such as checking the IPs of everyone Jose won and lost money to during his time playing there.

Or, they could take the route they have, which is doing jack ****, and just giving the middle finger to their entire player base...

Yeah it's basically inconceivable that during an account review Lock could have discovered someone else played the -36k plo session yet completely overlooked a 100k chip dump. Lock was obviously complicit in covering up the dump. To minimize the bad press for one of their pros and their site they let him cop to the lesser charge of just having someone log on and lose 36k without his knowledge

The only possible explanations are extreme incompetence or complicity in the coverup. Given that the security team was looking close enough at the account to discover the -36k sess wasn't him I can't believe for a second they can feign ignorance here.

C'mon lock and merge. The more days it takes to get your story together, the more it looks like you have stuff to hide. You could do poker a great service by:

(1) Explaining your actions during the scandal (not another BS PR statement)
(2) Answering questions itt
(3) Providing info and data (IP addresses, log on times etc) to help us verify what happened (this stuff could be provided confidentially to someone like NoahSD if necc).

Im in the US, running out of " actions" to reconsider.

Yeah, you think you are getting off lightly so far. Sooner or later the full attention will be focused on YOU!

It's been proven time and again without the bigger more respected names like yours getting involved the sites have little to no motivation to provide answers of any kind, I hope your call to action is enough to get the ball rolling to begin bringing forth an even modicum of transparency. Thankfully there are name players like yourself and sites like subject poker looking out for the community.

t the very least merge has an obligation to perform their own investigation into Locks handling of the whole situation in an attempt at transparency to protect the player on the other skins from possible fraud or a cover up by one of their rouge skins.

Lock are apparently the only source to have ever met 'Jose' or someone claiming to be 'Jose' in the world - wowzers! Just one source (Henrique Pinto) has even met his Uncle so Lock truly sit in a privileged position. Did none of the other pros meet the new prodigy?

If Lock don't want to be the next UB (oh no, KGC regulated) or just another Euro site that fixes their promotions, might be time to start talking!

Looking like Hasseb, Poker Royalty and Lock came up with a nice marketing ploy that has monumentally backfired - Jungleman's Euro personna ensuring Crock Poker of HS games

I can assure everyone that I am paying very close attention to what the community is saying, and not just ignoring you and hoping it goes away.

I know there will be more information forthcoming, but I cannot elaborate any more than that in an official capacity until an official statement is made.

-Rizen

Understandable from you personally (you can't speak as their rep without authorization), but I think you can understand that it's in your best interests that a new statement and full explanation be forthcoming very quickly.

I await with interest further statements from Lock.

I deposited a small amount on Lock during their Ipad promo but have just withdrawn it all because of this.

^^^ casper if ur serious lol that was pretty pathetic of you to do, i mean you took your money off a site that had cheaters doing bad things? newsflash! happens on everysite and once they get all the info theyll fill us in, till then chillout

Everysite has cheaters doing bad things and granted, it seems like Girah/DIH sort of disguised the chipdump. But after Lock (to its credit) discovered the backer playing on the account and nullified his contest win, they proceeded to conduct an "audit" of his play for the month.

They determined he still won the contest legitimately despite the obvious red flag that he won 100K in that nosebleed h/u match in the final 2 days of the contest (he won the contest with a 104K profit for the month) when the majority of his play prior was medium to mid-stakes.

So Lock...
1) didn't fire Girah after the initial violation (backer playing on the account)
2) conducted an incompetent audit
3) isn't really forthcoming about what happened, what they knew and when or some basic details of the audit.

On principal, it's enough for me to withdraw my small roll there. If they are more forthcoming, then I may come back.

I don't agree with this. As a player in the current environment I don't blame anyone who assumes the worst or takes precautions. Unfortunately over the last 2-3 years events in the industry have made everyone (rightly) cynical towards all things online poker.

It is our job to do what is necessary to get these players back, and I sincerely hope that at some point we are able to earn the business back. I don't think anyone withdrawing their money is 'pathetic' though. As players (and consumers in general) the biggest voice we have is our wallets, and I would expect all players to exercise that right regardless as to my personal belief on their stance.

-Rizen