Real Name: Josh Seeley (aka Brady Joshua Seeley)
WSOP.com SN: DontBl1nk
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/joshseeley7
Skype: ctrlaltdel702
Josh was staked by Imawhale for online cash games starting in June 2017. Josh had an impressive history of playing so he was started at mid-high stakes. His first month with Imawhale he won approximately $26,000 in which was profit split 50/50.
The site we were backing Josh on was an Asian based credit/agent site. As such, players were responsible for keeping track of their own results and at month’s end we would match up player’s results vs what the site reported. Every month we would have guys that would be off here and there, generally by $100 or less. It’s a fairly tedious process to keep track of the results so these small mistakes were bound to happen. With Josh though, we get to his 2nd month of playing for us and his spreadsheet at month’s end shows he is down approximately $2,000, but the site is saying he’s down over $19,000. We immediately went to Josh about this and researched the issue. He had just lazily not input a bunch of losing sessions in his results. We verified the results by logging into the apps. Again, most player’s discrepancies are off by $100 here and there, and Josh was off by $17,000. This was a major issue and a huge red flag to us.
In the 2nd month (July), Josh went into makeup and severely under reported his losses. He played sparingly over the next couple months. In early October, Josh lost in excess of $50,000 and again significantly under reported his losses, giving Imawhale no notice of the situation. Josh would have been moved down in stakes as per Imawhale's normal policies to avoid such a large catastrophic loss. After some difficulty, Imawhale was able to get in touch with Josh and set up a group conversation to make a game plan to attack this makeup total moving forward. Imawhale offered Josh the chance to buyout of his makeup at a small fraction of the makeup total, which Josh declined, assuring that he would try to grind out of the makeup. In the rest of October and November Josh played extremely low volume.
In Josh’s 3rd month (August), again Josh’s results vs what he reported were way off. This month he tells us immediately that he just stopped reporting his results completely mid month. We eventually have to manually adjust his results by $6,000 which were losses he just failed to report. He finishes August down $2,100.
In September, Josh won $15,200 back, reducing his makeup with us to $6,300. Unfortunately from here it goes downhill quickly. In October Josh loses $50,000 playing the first 7 days of the month as well as the 10th day and then quitting the rest of the month. At this point Josh is in $56,000 of makeup and the makeup with his backer becomes the least of his worries and he effectively quits playing. Between October 11th and November 26th Josh manages to play 1 day of poker. As a horse playing for a backer, building up a large amount of makeup and then quitting on it is the biggest scum move someone can make. Taking a 50/50 deal w/ a backer only in an effort to freeroll him (collect and play if it goes well, and quit if it goes bad) is the lowest of all things a player can do when taking a stake. We do have a requirement in our staking agreements that states:
“Imawhale has the right to opt out of the stake at any time. Reasons for opting out of a stake in the past have included: lack of updates, poor results, missing volume requirements, or violating other terms of this agreement and/or the poker network. It's very unlikely Imawhale will opt out of the stake, but we reserve the right to do so if needed. If you choose to opt out of the stake while in makeup, you will owe 100% of your makeup back to Imawhale. Players are required to play a minimum of 10 hours per week.”
Josh was not keeping up with his 10 hours/week of play, was not updating his results correctly and just in general had a flippant attitude towards our stake.
In December, Josh ceased play entirely and went completely MIA, stopping responding to Imawhale's Skype messages, emails, text messages, and phone calls. After over a month, Imawhale finally heard back from Josh. Josh explained he was very busy with the WPT 5 Diamond classic, and that he then went abroad and was not checking emails, text messages or skype messages while over there.
Imawhale ultimately decided this person was not to be trusted and had such a low level of professionalism that the best route was to simply swallow the entirety of the makeup total and part ways. In hindsight, it seems that Josh's plan all along was to treat the stake as a freeroll, planning on collecting if he won and abandoning all responsibility if he lost. The entire situation is one of the worst staking experiences in the history of Imawhale. We would highly recommend avoiding any and all financial transactions with Josh Seeley.
Last edited by Bobo Fett; 07-10-2018 at 06:15 PM.
Reason: Removed personal info.