ALL of the CHARGES will get DROPPED vs BAAZOV

Totally possible if he offers the investigators the names of people that convinced the hedge funds to give him the loans, while making money illegally, for doing so.

I Didn't clarify in my post but he will skate free and not have to talk. His lawyers will take care of everything.

You should have stopped at your 1st prediction.

Eye-opening new info in this link. The Baazov insider trading stuff goes back far longer than just the Amaya/Stars transaction. Basically every deal they were involved in going back to 2010 (if not further) allegedly involved David telling his brother Josh, who then relayed the info to their mutual friend Levett who then cut Josh checks. The Baazov family is dirty as the day is long.

"The illicit trading reportedly dates back to Amaya’s late-2010 discussions about acquiring online gambling technology firm Cryptologic. The AMF files reportedly show telephone calls between David and Josh, followed by calls from Josh to Levett, who went on to make multiple equity purchases in Cryptologic.

The AMF files reportedly show evidence of similar shenanigans involving a total of seven companies – Amaya, Cryptologic, Chartwell Technology, WMS Industries, Bwin, Intertain Group and the Oldford Group – over a five-year period.

In the case of WMS Industries, which was acquired by Scientific Games Corp for $1.42b in 2013, Josh reportedly intercepted communications between David and an attorney discussing the imminent acquisition, which Josh subsequently relayed to Levett.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of WMS shares were purchased by Levett, his wife Nathalie Bensmihan, his brother Earl and three other associates, netting the six individuals over $170k in profits. Levett subsequently cut Josh two checks totaling $32,100 that were marked ‘gift’ in the memo section.

The Levett family’s Amaya-related transactions reportedly earned them over $500k in illegal profits since 2010. The AMF says a further $800k in profit was generated via illegal trades related to Amaya’s 2014 $4.9b purchase of the Oldford Group, the parent company of PokerStars and Full Tilt.

Also sharing in the inside wealth was Feras Antoon, the Montreal-based online porn baron behind Brazzers and other wanking sites, who the AMF believes pocketed $83k from illegal trades based on Amaya insider info.

The insider dealings were reportedly ongoing at the time the warrants were issued, as the AMF believes Josh, Levett and their accomplices were poised to benefit from insider knowledge of David’s recently announced plan to take Amaya private (a plan David insists is still in play, regardless of the charges)."

unreal.

this section of article most relevant in relation to future of Stars.

Amazing how time and again people think they are so smart/ powerful/ big they can do whatever they want without any fear of being caught.

Because sadly most of the time they are right.

I'm quite sure virtually every pro would agree the change in player pool makeup has been dramatic. Perhaps we're all wrong though and you're right?

Here's an old post of mine with a pretty diagram to help you visualise it better:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...64&postcount=1


So basically, in the past few years we have gone from an environment with a pool of players that looked like this pre-Black Friday, and pre-dating many of the educational websites, coaches, software tools:



To the current environment which has a much higher reg:casual player ratio:



(Those outside of the circle represent ex-players who are no longer part of the player pool)

NB: The information shown in these diagrams is for demonstration purposes on how the player makeup has shifted- they are not intended to be precise ratios.


Anyway, this pointless conversation is taking the thread off course. Post in the Riggies thread.

Interestingly enough, I was trying to search for something related to the calvinayre article and found this unsealed indictment of Ofer Baazov - who is aka Josh Baazov in the ayre article. In this complaint it seems they are listing them as two separate people unless I am misunderstanding the sentence.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/pres...-against-phony

One of many companies charged under "Project Jackpot" which apparently was an FTC consumer protection effort to stop telemarketers from lying to consumers in 1996. The Baazov-led company listed also happens to be operating in Quebec.

David Baazov is not listed in this indictment, however.

Yeah the first article linked mentioned or at least implied that he was pretending to be two different people and they realised later.

* this one
https://advisor1.dynamic.ca/servlet/...cenic_24950113

http://calvinayre.com/2016/03/27/bus...llegal-trades/
https://twitter.com/cduhaime/status/714097545530638336

If you want a good breakdown of how these things happen, here's a good breakdown of the tangentially related Shkreli affair:
http://www.bloombergview.com/article...-good-at-fraud

It's a funny thing.. that page you just ripped out of a 4 year old's coloring book reminded me of the rake graphs pokerstars released proving without any doubt that they are our best choice out there.
Are you claiming this is how the pool looked right after black Friday, or are you saying this is what it looks like today?
Anyway, you can march right back to the rig thread where you came from and defend pokerstars as much as you like.

right after Black Friday tonnes of rec players and a few regs left. then, many of the regs rejoined but no recs rejoined. since then more regs have joined and recs remained about constant (depending who you ask it may lower or go up but it certainly has gone done vs regs ratio)

I honestly don't intend to be mean with this but pretty much 100% of ppl who suggest or think stars is rigged have never been winning players in their lives. I am not saying there is no chance something is going on but it's highly unlikely and this is simply true, timex recently said that in the podcast.

So is Ofer/Josh Baazov the same brother whose driver's license David used to rent an apartment after his parents threw him out of the house when he was a teenager (as reported by Forbes last year)? If so, these two seem to be pretty "tight"...

It's going to be interesting to see how they convince regulators going forward that they want "regulated" gambling everywhere because you want to protect consumers from shady foreign operators.

Good thing Isai sold the company to a "clean" entity so that online poker could come back (state-by-state) in the US!!

Also, per the end of the Calvin Ayre article (re: Baazov's future with the company), looking at the two years Amaya owned/ran Ongame would be also relevant. Traffic dropped significantly - from the outside, the site appeared to pretty much go in the tank. The eventual sale was very convoluted in a way that made it hard to value, and Amaya eventually recognized a $32 million loss (more complicated than true value, but still). This was in late-2014 when everyone was trumpeting Baazov as the brilliant new king, when the actual running of a poker/gambling site had gone quite the opposite.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...ports-1576339/

Baazov/Amaya's track record demonstrates a phenomenal ability to get outside financing when needed (original Amaya IPO when they were in financial straits, Stars LBO, etc.), not in actually operating an online gambling site over the long-haul for profit (like Isai did masterfully).

If I'm an Amaya shareholder (with a last name other than Baazov ), I would certainly want someone else running the company in the future. Unless there's another $10 billion in funding lurking out there that's going to magically make all these problems go away.

i like isai but let's be real. if you think your company is worth $2B and some donk wants to buy it for $5B, it could be kim jong un for all i care, that bad boy is getting sold

The sentiments of these players that believe stars is rigged is a direct reflection of excessively raked games.


Not completely accurate, Ayre knew this was coming, as did SOME players, but collectively we could not admit it to ourselves and still can't seem to as a group:

I agree, just making the (sad face) point that this is another nail in the coffin for further expansion of online poker back into the US.

"Online gambling/poker should be & stay illegal. It's run by shady people & crooks."

"No, no. That belief used to be grounded in some fact, but it's successfully regulated in many other countries and the biggest companies of today are operated by experienced legitimate executives, just as any Fortune 500 company would be."

[News of Baazov indictment breaks]

"[Crickets]"

Baazov looking more and more like Tzvetkoff and less like what the "new school" needs to be to get poker back into the US (which was already a big hill to climb).

Also from that Daily Globe article linked above:



And a blurb about/from Nelson Rose towards the end (US gambling law expert):

This insider trading, et. al. mess strengthens the fight of any entrenched anti-online gambling interests in the US. In the back rooms and committee hearings, no one was ever going to win an argument that, "online poker wasn't really illegal if you look at nuance of gambling laws (or lack thereof), stop it with your fake morality bull****." Instead, the best play has been, "Maybe those old iPoker guys were bad. But, we're the new operators who are clean, legal, honest, and worthy of the public's trust."

That new best argument is largely shot now. "Fool me once, shame on me," has just transpired...

Or however some fancy "shame" saying goes, lol.

Three things about this, aside from the underlying central issue of insider trading:

1. The relatively small profits given the risk, time and again .... I was intrigued about the item about Josh intercepting a privileged communication between David and some legal counsel.
2. This may be the worst "trading on a brother" relationship since Billy and Jimmy Carter. (Billy and Cal Ripken does not count, that was part of the price to make/keep Cal happy and hardly a secret.)
3. The alleged payoff was in the form of checks noted as "gifts "? Seriously ?

Haha, I had all of those thoughts, as well.

I suppose getting away with those things for years gave them an arrogance that they could continue getting away with it.

so, when do we find out if he is guilty?