It is literally the private game business model. If you are a winning player you will be forced to sell action by the owners at some point.

Worst case I've experienced was being offered a game by a poker-"celebrity" streamer if I was willing to sell action, then marketing the game he was running by name dropping the biggest whale who is a well known gambling addict former sports star. Later found out streamer and whale are childhood friends.

Best case he gave the money he made on action back to the whale but still seems like some pretty ****ed up enabling.

Brynn Kenney is so full of ****. The interview with Sarah herring…… idk I don’t believe he never ghosted or had people that ghosted others. He said he did help others in person at times during live play (online) which I believe but you can’t tell me he (or his coaches/ best players) didn’t use teamviewer to tell people what to do at FTs. He couldn’t even give a proper answer to why he had teamviewer. A good answer would have been for group chat with his horses (the stable I was in prior to Black Friday used team viewer as a group chat + the top coach would ghost horses at final tables)

Also I didn’t like his answer as to why he was no longer with GG poker. He gave no reason why he left them and said it was his decision and had nothing to do with GG. I don’t believe this- kenney was prolly using RTA and told to hit the highway.

Also Martin Zamani is scum also. Anyone that would take part in this type of scheme is highly questionable. It’s good he is talking about it but very grimey behavior in high stakes.

Yeah since we didn't get a clear explanation as to why he left GGPoker, I believe it follows logically that Bryn was using RTA, maybe even some kind of superuser capabilities since he could allegedly see his opponents' screens.

Superusing would require different information than we have right now. We'd need proof that we currently do not have.

I think it has been confirmed, to my level of confidence, that he could see Martin's and sergi's screens.

He dropped sergi after catching him rta'ing at least a few times, so that speaks to Bryn wanting rta out of GG by his horse.

So whatever that all means.

The best way to get more confessions from people like Martin are to not shoot the messenger and stay focused on the most important issues at hand.

One of the weirder things I learned in this situation is that players are staking people and getting staked at the same time, while putting their horses action on their own stake. This is too fishy sounding to be totally on the up and up, I can not understand it at all.

It's been a week now and I'm left with the sense that shady stuff was almost certainly going on, but without some more damning evidence from Lauren, Martin, or some third party who is currently undecided on whether they need the hassle of getting involved or not, I can see this thing slowly fading away in the next week or two.

What we really need is another disaffected horse to come out of the woodwork to add weight to Martin's story, preferably with some chat logs etc to back it up. If such a person is out there, I think I can speak for most in saying that you won't be judged too harshly. On the contrary, I think most of us would see you as a hero.

I disagree OTR, I think it's already proven that he used RTA (and probably superuser software although we can't quite be 100% on this) because we don't have a good explanation of why he left GGpoker.

Please try harder. Nothing has evoked that pre-Black Friday era as much as this scandal. A SrslySirius song/video would make the whole thing even more epic. Joey Ingram got HIS bat signal --- consider this yours.

I know that many of the people Bryn was staking during the 2009 WSOP got screwed over really badly (just as I did), but I didn't know any of them personally and none of them were big name players to my knowledge. Besides Chad Batista saying a lot of shady stuff about Bryn (and he was staked by Sheets by that time), I'm not sure who the other backees besides myself actually were. At least I can't recall any names 13 years later now.

"Backee" would be a generous way to describe my relationship with Bryn at that point anyway, considering that he just free rolled me in half the series and then never paid me back. He even managed to convince me to pay him almost $40k for some online losses-while being staked by him. He also attempted to free roll me in a huge session in Bobby's Room that same summer, but I took numerous steps at that point to make sure it didn't happen, since between a text I received that his other backees were having issues with him, and the fact that I hadn't been able to meet up with him to get paid for any of my wsop buy ins, I wanted to be on the safe side. I'm glad I was, because the way the session went down was like this:

-Bryn tells me ahead of time that he wants a piece of my action if I play (25%), without stipulating details such as how much I'd be buying in for and his effective max, or responding as far as paying me first
-I try to get in contact with him repeatedly leading up to the game
-I text him the morning of the game and tell him I'm assuming that he isn't buying any action since I hadn't heard back from him, and that I'll be playing with 100% of myself.
-I play the game and profit something like $250k
-After the game, he finally texts me and goes "how did the session go"?

Shady enough for you yet?

If any of those people from 2009 (backees mentioned) could come forward it would be nice. I imagine many of them are like me now though- no longer actively playing and likely unaware of any of this. I only found out because I had drama with the person in question and a friend of mine messaged me to tell me about this scandal as a result.

Wow even more 100% undeniable proof comes out. This scumbag really asked you how your session went? And you waited this long to out him?

Just to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was just curious whether he made the right decision not to go through with the stake?

The Bobby's room story is obviously a lot more tenuous than the wsop freeroll, but knowing Bryn and how he had been operating it was incredibly obvious to me that if I told him I had a winning session he would have demanded his 25%, and if I had lost he would have claimed to not have a piece. Hence his phone suddenly ceasing to exist leading up to the session.

I think the part to focus on is how he free-rolled me for half the WSOP when I was at a near peak in my career and those tournaments were worth a solid 6 figures in expectation, and did so after offering me an impossible staking deal ($500k+ to start, would stake me in the biggest games in the world including some in Russia for some reason, would cover me at nosebleeds and in Bobby's room etc). And of course, eventually just ran away from the stake without ever paying me the money for buy ins that he owed me. The story went that he had all of this money to stake people because he was incredibly rich now from sportsbetting- and then the narrative quickly changed to him not having any money at all, once again because of sports betting. Either way I got ****ed over pretty nicely.

There is some more such as having me play HU on someone else's account at one point, but I don't really know what was up with that and it was a weird one time thing when it happened. I messaged the person I was supposedly playing to make sure they knew it was me and they confirmed that they did. The whole thing made little sense to me. Why did he want me to play nosebleeds on this random account, and to do so against someone who would never normally give me any action? I never put much thought into it until reading some of the subtle backing related manipulations described in this thread, and I still don't have any real explanation.

There were online forums at that time including here. Why didn't you out that scumbag after all that happened? He freerolled you, effectively stole $40,000 and then tried to do some shady **** with you in a big game in Bobby's room.

Didn't you feel like the poker community was owed this info and maybe had you outed him then, he wouldn't have gotten so big to be able to have a massive cheating ring going.

I literally did this. There were multiple train wreck threads across this site and pocketfives and who knows where else. It was made much worse by the altercation that ensued between me and Kenney in PCA 2010, which is what triggered the actual threads. Back then everyone wasn't like 35 and rich and threatening legal action, so instead there were just random death threats and tons of denials. It was a total shitshow seemingly lost to the sands of time. I obviously handled the entire thing incredibly poorly, and I should have outed him that summer instead of waiting until January. I think I just had too much money for my own good and at the time I didn't care enough, combined with other life factors like having a girlfriend for the first time and starting college and generally just being really busy and not wanting to get involved in some huge drama that was already over.

Obviously my mind changed on this relatively quickly.

Appreciate your honesty about everything. Agree with you though, had you outed him in the summer instead of January maybe that changes his whole future in this community.

What a f'n scumbag, dude Bryn ranks right up there for me as 1 of the shadiest, dirtiest and scummiest in the poker community.

I don't want to give the impression that I just remained silent on this from July 2009 to January 2010 either. I told every single poker player I talked to regularly what Bryn did, which was several dozen people including many of the best high stakes players in the world. I may not have gone on 2+2 right away to start some train wreck thread like I definitely should have, but I didn't pull any punches as far as freely sharing information with other players. I was just a little too slow, and despite at that point in time being one of the biggest name players, I was perhaps still not universally respected enough to want to come on here and start making accusations. I was well known for being "controversial", which is to say that I had a sizable ego and trash talked way too freely, and therefore I had a decent amount of people who basically hated me. So while people would have listened to any thread I started, it would not have been a fun experience for me to be a part of that drama. Of course it came to be anyway under much worse circumstances the next year, when I had partially discredited myself by getting in said altercation with Kenney at PCA and triggering all of the articles and threads that came from that, which all tended to focus on the altercation itself, rather than the accusations and events that were the actual cause of what had happened.

Are you ActionJeff?

http://www.onlinepoker.net/poker-new...neys-face/4359

Of course, Jeff Garza.

Yeah so, those quotes could reflect just slightly better upon my state of mind at the time. That is pretty damn painful to read.

I'm not going to even try to defend the absolutely ******ed stuff I said (and in this case, did) sometimes when I was 21, but suffice to say, that was the low point for me, and more importantly in the context of this discussion, any allegations against Bryn were massively overshadowed by that one event, to the detriment of myself and seemingly also the high stakes community

These are good, thanks for sharing. Are you willing to share your stories publicly via Twitter with receipts? It's only by sharing with the receipts that wiĺl make a real difference here. This goes for any allegation made by anyone in this thread.

He's about the least credible person someone could have testify on something like this. Has anyone else, hopefully someone with an ounce of credibility, come forward to speak out on these matters?

Also, where is the evidence he was going to release to Doug after the interview? Why has this not been released to the public yet (or has it and nobody is discussing it)?


Sounds like you got hustled. Potentially he tried to freeroll you in the bobby's room game as well but it's a freeroll that has like a zero % chance of working on anyone with a brain and some balls (unless it was just an attempt to setup a bigger hustle). On the flipside, maybe he had just been sleeping with his phone off.

It's good that people from his distant past are speaking up. It certainly gives some insight into Bryn Kenney. However, on the flip side after doing terrible things to you in his Magic days you continued to do business with him (and I assume socialized with him) for years and year after, and yet we are supposed to just gloss that over and just assume that since Bryn Kenney did some shady things as a child playing Magic that Bryn Kenney is a bad man doing bad things in the 2020s. What's really needed are credible people from the present to speak up. Bryn Kenney seems to do business with dozens if not hundreds of people and yet all I sense in this thread are crickets.

"Great humans" LMAO yeah right!


LoL, go to any live poker room in the world and you'll find some of the most shady disgusting human beings you have ever met. LoL @ not being worse than any other industry.

Not saying spitting on someone is a good thing, but don't be so hard on yourself, man. We all make huge mistakes when we're that young.

It wasn't the right reaction, but you were right to have a very angry reaction

This is from my local room. I know this guy from being goofy on the PA system and kicking people out. I'm not sure I agree that all online poker is rigged, but I'm not really sure that's what he's trying to say. I don't play online anymore since I live like 10mins from PBKC, and I never played as high as 5k or 10k tournaments online.

I'd even argue that spitting on some scumbag who cheated you out of a bunch of money isn't a big deal at all. He wouldn't feel bad about spitting in the street so really what's the difference?

So many people in poker have scammed so much money from people and NOTHING ever happens to them.