Hi Everyone:

A friend of mine ran across this youtube video on 30 poker scams:



I think it's three months old but don't remember seeing it here before.

For anyone interested, here are four more scams that I'm aware of:

1. The Go for The Gold poker tournament in 1984 at The Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas

2. Johnson's Joust at The Commerce Club in 1986.

3. The CEO Poker Tour in 2006

4. The 50 Hour Poker Show to benefit the 22 Q Foundation in 2012.

If there's interest I can talk a little about these four events.

Mason

Not particularly interested.

I played in a draw lowball tournament @ the Riv around 1984, $500 entry I think. It could have been Go For Gold.

I'm interested in hearing more about it, assuming it was fraudulent.

I watched this video a few days ago and it was an interesting blast from the past and a reminder of how predatory the poker community can be, even away from the tables.


Jungleman being involved in multi-accounting / ghosting back in the day (Girah scandal) and more recently in the Perkins / Bilzerian scandal was a surprise.

These are just the scams that were outed…

I wonder what percentage of scams are outed and how many are currently taking place.

5. Guy sells a poker forum with 1,000,000 useless trolls for big money

6) Guy steals $130,000 from amateur woman on live stream, claiming "Nobody hero calls the hero!"

Thanks, quite a walk down memory lane.

This picture also has tremendous photoshop potential.

Hi Hero:

Yes, that was the Go For the Gold tournament except I remember the buy-in being $1,000. The other thing interesting about it was that before the tournament it was announced that first place would pay $100,000, second place would pay $50,000, and third place would pay $25,000. No other places would be paid. And there would also be rebuys.

So far, this is not a scam. But notice that the more buy-ins and rebuys there are, the more the tournament operators would make, and if the number of buy-ins and rebuys were small, they would actually lose money.

(The Venetian did something like this more recently and it was not well received on this website.)

Anyway, where there was a possible scam is that apparently, based on what I heard, rebuys were allowed up to the final table, and there were even accusations that some of the later rebuys were sold at half price,

Mason

Johnson's Joust in my opinion is one of the more interesting scams. In the mod 1980s there was a person who called himself Chip Johnson, not his real name, who gave poker lessons and who I did not have a favorable view of. He also claimed to have a Ph.D in both music and math. And while he did play the piano quite well, I once asked him what a "group" was and he had no idea what I was talking about.

Anyway, in (I think) 1986, he and his University of Poker, talked his way into The Commerce Casino. (He also had a rather extensive chip collection which was put on display.) Even though he wasn't a manager, he seemed to have become the most important person in The Commerce Casino.

Associated with him was a poker game that he called "Johnson." It was a heads-up draw game, where, if I remember right, each player received five cards and it was Jacks or Better to Open. If no one opened, the game would revert to Ace-to Five Lowball Draw. (Around this time Mike Caro put out a book called New Poker Games and if I remember correctly Johnson was one of the new games.)

Anyway, what happened was Chip Johnson started a tournament for his games. On the wall a huge tennis draw appeared with a number of different levels. I don't remember the amounts exactly but the lowest level was something like a $25 entry. Once you had won enough matches, you would not only receive some money but would also get an entry into the next highest levels, perhaps it was a $100 entry. Also, players could buy there way into any level with the last level being a $10,000 buy-in. And if you lost your match, you could always rebuy into the entry level.

And in the Commerce poker room a huge table was built extending across the poker room floor to accommodate the heads-up matches (and I think as many as 30 matches could be handled at the same time). In addition, a huge horse with a knight sitting on the horse was built and the knight held a giant spear that extended across a large portion of the table.

Now so far, there's no scam, and all of this might have actually been a good idea. But after a couple of weeks the tournament was closed down and I heard that Chip Johnson bought some cheap digital watches and gave them to the players who had won several rounds.

Needless to say, this caused some problems and Chip Johnson was gone from The Commerce Casino. But most important the city council for the City of Commerce apparently met to consider a motion to close The Commerce Casino, and, based on what I heard, the motion was voted down 3 to 2.

Mason

I remember Chip Johnson. I was only in LA on business travel those days and mostly played at The Bike (The Bike was the number 1 poker club by far around 1986) but played enough elsewhere to run into Johnson quite a few times. I remember Johnson's Joust but stayed away as it seemed very sketchy. Chip actually dressed like a con man from an old movie (western style sport jacket, vest and I think fat tie of some sort). He was always pushing lessons and talk about his students but I wasn't impressed by his play. The one book I remember him writing he touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was for the most part a spiral bound printout of holdem hand stats on dry runouts (this may have been published a bit after 1986 as holdem wan't legal in California before the spring of 1987). I bought all the poker books back then and may have an old copy in my basement (as an aside at one point I had a copy of Sklansky on Holdem bought for $1.95 at Gambler's Book Club in 1981). It fell apart and I replaced it with the $2.95 version the next year which wasn't as much a collector's item. Also had some of your books in spiral bound.

Anyway thanks for the story!