On the flip side of this, I wonder if players who lose on the apps declare the losses as a tax off set.

If they do, then the IRS are for sure being cheated out of tax if profits are not being declared by players who win on the app and/or agents/club owners who are making an income from rake, because the IRS would be giving tax relief to losing players but not collecting the equivalent back from winning players, agents and club owners.

True but 99+ percent of people lose gambling but the 1 percent who win (or some portion of them ) pay taxes on it while the loser get no relief.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some shady stuff going on with these youtubers. It is a bit strange.

Clickbait is out of control too. they were playing 1/3 and 2/5 and the vlogs were titled something like "My Poker Journey Episode 1"

Now it's "I ALMOST GET SHOT BY SECURITY??? 5 MILLION DOLLAR BUYIN PLAYING 50K/100K AT THE WHITE HOUSE"

Yeah like Rampage, i remember when i first heard/saw his videos i would listen to Rampage break down hands and it was just pure comedic gold even for a 1/3 2/5 reg and now i watch a few months later and hes playing 50/100 or whatever lol? I just always assumed he binked a bunch of tournaments or something but i dont see where he can go from scraping 1/3 to now just punting off in 25/50 games or whatever and 10k tourneys like its nothing... Always found that a bit strange

Rampage does make quite a lot of money from youtube and he is a pretty good MTT player, has binked a few both online and live. Can't take that away from him

Rampage has 1 WSOP bracelet, 4 WSOPC rings and an Aria high roller title all from just past 12 months alone, as well as just led the WPT Bellagio after Day1... eventually busted out but he def isn't a shabby tourney player and this is while spending half the time playing cash games and another valuable chunk of his time producing video content.

The ClubGG stuff can def be dodgy at times but to say rampage scammed people or had no bankroll is pretty lol... also don't believe all the hands you see on vlogs, nobody is going to put their tag nit sessions on video cos they'd get 0 views.. Obv you post the crazy bluffs and then hopefully, ya know, get people punt off to you when you aren't recording and hold the nuts or 2nd nuts cos they watched your videos and believed that's how you *always* play, ya know?

Fwiw I've played cash with rampage a few times, not a friend of his, have no idea if his ClubGG stuff is dodgy, but in the cash sessions he was not even remotely close to the superlag punter in his youtube videos. Pretty much just an ABC tag grinder like other regs in the 5/10 10/20..

I've always assumed that these guys are making a decent chunk of passive income from vlogging/youtube/content. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if they sell action when they play these nosebleed streamed games. They have access to super soft stream games while being decent regs so I'd guess there are multiple people who are more than willing to take some of their action. There's nothing shady about that and it'd just be responsible BRM. If not, maybe they just feel comfortable taking shots because they have steady income to rely on. If he's grinding T20 on the reg then it's not too much of a shot for him to jump in a juicy 50/100 game every now and then.

I've never watched any of these vloggers tho so this is just my hunch.

My experience w club gg:

I deposited a couple hundred won 2k and was cashed out in small amounts less than my original deposit.

I was told absolutely no rakeback under any circumstances.

I played a couple freerolls and realized that you could late reg in the money. Seems legit.

The 3rd or 4th time I played on there I was playing HU w someone and after not too many hands of battling all of a sudden an entire buy in had come off the table. The rake was glaring.

The players seem really bad though.

I snap cashed out and never played again. The end.

He sold action on stakekings for his $10K WPT main last week
Also last week he tweeted asking for money/action to buy into Live at the Bike for $100K at last notice..

As for GG, their poker site is literally rake theft for anything other than nosebleeds so I'd have to assume ClubGG operates the same way... anybody can be an agent but the risk is inherent, it's like back in the Pokermaster days, I knew people that didn't cash out until they lost 6figs due to china's crackdown but these were the same ppl that told everyone it was safe and no need for periodic withdrawals... until they got burned ofc.

I would think that there are a lot of players who were ripped off, or at least feel that they were ripped off (e.g. colluded against), but will they post ITT about it?, probably not through embarrassment, and will they report it to any official body?, e.g. the police force, well, ermm, no, because it would in effect also be reporting on themselves for taking part in what is possibly an illegal activity.

The above, especially the second part, is what may be giving these (possibly illegal) clubs the most protection,..... that victims are afraid to report it to the authorities.

Very similar to if an underground live poker room rips off, steals from or cheats a player. The player is very unlikely to go to the police.

There is the embarrassment factor too.

I once got scammed for the equivalent of about 1 month's salary (I was about 22) when I rented an apartment from someone who had the keys, but turned out not to be the owner.

They gave me false id that matched genuine utility bills of the address. It turned out in the end that they were an ex tenant and that the owner was long term sick in hospital.

Anyway, I was massively embarrassed about it when I reported it to the police, and I hadn't done anything wrong, unlike any possible victims of these apps/clubs, who may feel like they were doing something wrong or illegal, even if they were the ones ultimately getting scammed.

The rake on Club GG is much higher. Rake cap at 5/10 is $25 on the club compared to $15 on GG.

Rampage actually seems to be pretty smart about his money, selling action for big tourneys and soft HS cash…I’d imagine he could just pay people to do customer service for him on the apps, also even with paying others I’d imagine his app money is his main income driver…yes I know he does well on YouTube

The thing is that splash squad or whatever probably has better security than other apps as far as allowing people to multiaccount.. it seems smaller and tight nit.

I didn’t feel colluded or cheated but I did feel ripped of by rake.

The thing is that splash squad or whatever probably has better security than other apps as far as allowing people to multiaccount.. it seems smaller and tight nit.

I didn’t feel colluded or cheated but I did feel ripped off by rake.

Also it’s not illegal to play app poker.. it’s only illegal to take rake out of the pot or charge fees…

The risk is unequivocally on the operators and owners as far as legality.

Your posts lose all validity when you say stuff like this.

As I understand it, I agree with you that operators taking money out of the pot, at best is a gray area regarding legality, and at worst is outright illegal. I would say that the latter is much more likely, it being outright illegal. I also realise that "technically" they are not taking any money out of the cash games pots, nor charging juice on tournaments, although we know that they really are, but in a sneaky way by using player to player transfers.

What you may be overlooking, is that because all chips on the app are play chips that as we know represent "promised money" when cashed out, but never are converted into money nor sent as money by the club operators, all financial transactions are player to player.

Therefore: (as an indicative example), player A who is "depositing" $500 in order to get 500 play chips added to his app account is asked by the agent to transfer $100 to player B, $150 to player C, and $250 to player D, all three of whom are "cashing out".

* There is a small chance that the authorities (Police, DOJ etc have no idea that this practice is going on.)

This system has been stated as fact by many posters on this forum on various threads, by people such as Joey Ingram on his podcast, and in this thread.

So player A is directly facilitating the whole scheme, as are players B, C and D, by agreeing to do player to player transactions that enable the club to circumvent the federal wire act and to circumvent the law regarding taking rake or juice.

The level of "guilt" of players A, B, C and D is debatable. I would perhaps liken it to a fence who buys and sells stolen goods but doesn't actually steal the goods.

Crimes have a perpetrator, but there are often accessories to the crime, or customers of the illegal product or service that is being supplied by the criminal, that are also committing a crime, so I don't think we should rule this out.

Additionally, if a player (a customer) is also proven to be colluding and therefore guaranteeing a profit for themselves, then they in my opinion are nearly as culpable as the agents and the club owners, perhaps equally as culpable, because all three of them are guaranteeing themselves profits from an illegal scheme.

You keep trying really hard to vividly imagine victims and issues that don’t exist ��

App clubs are composed of losing players, winning players, and the club owners. Relative to ACR/Stars, the losing players have more fun, the winning players win more money. And club owners are obv happy as value accrues to them in return for delivering clean rec-heavy online cash games.

I know you like to imagine unsuspecting plebs are lured in to illegal rake traps by predatory wolf-in-sheeps-clothing Youtubers, when in reality it’s just consenting, rake-aware, adults happily playing a card game with their community of choice.

App games are not “unbeatable” like you say, it’s quite the opposite actually. You must not have read CptUnderpants and PokerVloggers posts itt. They said winning players are limited when they win too much too fast, cuz the games are too easy to beat. That is accurate. That is what’s happening in reality. Not what you have made up/imagined/speculated itt.

Even the lowest stakes, highest raked games (in terms of bb/100) there are consistently winning regulars.

IF A GAME IS NOT SOFT/JUICY ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY THE COST OF PLAYING, IT WILL NOT RUN (or the table will quickly break). Poker players are rake-aware, EV-based thinkers and will break a game if it’s not worth playing. Just like live poker.

As for potential collusion/cheating, the mid-high stakes player pools are so small and tight-knit (even in the largest clubs) that any suspicious behavior sticks out like a sore thumb.

Prominent unions/clubs are very incentivized to keep the games clean and beatable. These things aren’t as hard to police as you imagine.

I don’t think I have anything else to say regarding the merit of app based clubs. If you have read this wall of text and are still skeptical, then it’s prob not for you. just don’t play on apps, you should just play somewhere else where you feel comfortable.

Lastly, I’m not really arguing that app-based poker is perfect, I’m arguing it’s usually more profitable for players than the benchmark online sites like ACR/Stars. Sorry if I came off shilly in my first post itt.

glhf all. ��

Your point of view is fair enough for yourself, but I would take issue with there not being collusion.

Perhaps you are aware enough and experienced enough to spot it, but this does not mean that many other players are.

You also claim that players are all rake aware, again this is you and the better and more experienced players that will be aware, but many other players won't be.

IMO, you are ignoring (perhaps unintentionally) that the reason why you have found value in app games, is because there are enough fish who have been lured in by vloggers, the vloggers not being transparent about rake, or about a much higher chance of collusion than on a regulated site, or informing the player that at best they are participating in a gray area illegal scheme and at worst a completely illegal scheme.

The bottom line for me is that people running these clubs on apps, apps that are categorically stated as being play money apps, are breaking/circumventing laws by turning them effectively into real money apps.

If one's attitude is to break a law when it suits you, then there is no point in having laws.

With all due respect, because ultimately you are just playing poker when playing on these club apps, you do actually have the identical philosophy to a fence who buys and sells stolen goods, in that you are not stealing the goods, so what harm is being done by you trading in them. It's like the goods have already been stolen by someone else (i.e. it is the club owners and their agents running the club, not you), so you therefore have no moral responsibility.

I am sorry, but in my opinion, you do.

Maybe I am in a small minority, but I do not like a lawless society, because once you accept lawlessness in certain areas, other things start to become blurred.

This is incredibly exploitative and only works to benefit the game runner

I get it that poker is a clownshoes industry and the most prominent members are nothing more than bozos jammed into a clown car, but we can at least be honest with ourselves

Fair enough. I respect that. Best of luck to you sir. 🫡

Thank you, you too.

Btw, I am not saying you are bad person by playing in the app clubs, I am saying that they are illegal and those running them or being agents for them should be prosecuted.

Because they do exist, they give you the opportunity to stray into a gray area. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't.

because you get banned from discord? you need a safe place to do transactions. That being said if someone like rampage is banning winning players for winning we should probably ostracized him from the community its one thing to do that in private games but they are basically running a poker site

Yes, I agree.

Putting the illegal nature of their operation to one side, it appears that they can neither guarantee no collusion between players, nor do they appear to have any systems in place, or perhaps any will to try to prevent colluders.

So it therefore looks as if, and as claimed by some posters ITT, that they are banning some winning players under the pretence that they are cheating (multi-accounting or colluding), whether the player is doing that or not, purely to enhance their own bottom line and to line their own pockets with other people's money.

And as stated by me earlier ITT, there is undoubtedly a reluctance for players who have had this done to them, to report it to law enforcement authorities, for fear of being themselves prosecuted for breaking the law.

I feel that at some point this whole *play money that is actually real money* illegal area of poker will break wide open to the authorities, due to some player, or players, somewhere, at some point, who get stiffed out of their money by an agent, or blatantly colluded against and think, "***k it, I am not taking this crap" and go to the police, even if they think it might implicate themselves for being a conduit in the overall scheme.

There is also a possibility that law enforcement are already on to it, but are biding their time while gathering a chunk of evidence, to then go in hard in one massive dawn raid style operation of multiple arrests.

Who investigates wire fraud? (source: https://www.robertmhelfend.com/feder...20%24250%2C000.)

Wire fraud is a federal crime that is investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Wire fraud occurs when someone uses wire, radio, or television communications to defraud others. This can include sending false information in order to obtain money or property, or sending threats to harm another person. Wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and can result in a fine of up to $250,000.

Illegal Gambling crimes: Just part of a large article about it here (https://www.criminallawyergroup.com/...ing%20activity.)

Under Section 1956 of the U.S. Code, the laundering of money or proceeds from an illegal gambling enterprise or online sports betting can result in a criminal punishment of 20 years in federal prison and/or $500,000 or twice the value of the property involved in the transaction.

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I just watched a fair bit of Ethan "Rampage" Yau playing on Hustler Casino live, and he is a pretty good cash game player, not yet perfect, but definitely with the potential to become top tier. He may also be a nice guy, I don't know. The problem for me, is that if he is indeed involved in these poker app club, very likely illegal, gambling operations, then he is taking a huge and unethical shortcut to reach high stakes, and an enormous potential risk to himself.

If he is involved, was it calculatingly planned by him, opportunism, or perhaps naivety? It is hard to know.

Could he and others reverse what they have been doing? Not completely, but they could stop right now, and should there then be a legal crackdown in the future, the fact that someone stops now would be a reasonable defence for them to use, to say that they were not aware that being an agent was against the law but as soon as they became aware, they stopped doing it.

It would not surprise me at all, if a lot of people running these clubs illegally and their agents, end up in jail.

Laws are not just made for the sake of it, they are real.

A definitive list of which poker vloggers are promoting/are agents for poker club apps would be useful to see, but here is one vlogger who is promoting an app and therefore possibly/likely to be an agent for it, or may be running/owning the club:

Lynne Ji

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU7VkRNPhlQ

Included on her YourTube page is:

To play with me on ClubGG go to http://*******/helloitslynne

I clicked through the link and it says she has 396 subscribers on her Club GG Telegram Channel

She is another player who seemingly out of nowhere has appeared in high stakes cash games, most notably on Live At The Bike, but also elsewhere.

She also seems blase about losing substantial amounts of money in a high stakes cash game session, but unlike Rampage who is at least good at poker, she IMO is clearly not.

This article https://www.mypokercoaching.com/lynne-ji/ tries to work out where her money comes from but comes up with no answers other than that she claims to play in private cash games. She provides no "receipts" for this in the article. If she does play in private cash games and that is how she got her poker roll, then the line ups would have to be pretty awful IMO for her to have an edge.

Again, I don't know if she is an agent for one of these apps or owns/runs and app game, but she is certainly promoting one on her YouTube channel, she has no known record (at least to me) of organically building her way up through the stakes, and has not declared how she can afford to be in such big games.

I know some players who I saw playing £1/£2 10+ years ago on a £200 stack in venues where I played, and busted their roll a number of times, and who grinded 100s of small buy in live comps and 10s of thousands of online MTTs, who through sheer hard work and dedication, and no small amount of skill, are now playing the very highest stakes.

I also know players who similarly started at low stakes and have been stuck in the £100 to £400 general buy in level for live MTTs for 10+ years and may never make it beyond that because they don't have enough innate talent or have got too old to learn GTO or to dedicate more time to improving their game in order to take it to the next level.

People like Yau, Ji, Moreno, Mariano and others, if they are illegally profiting from poker app clubs, are sticking one huge middle finger up at genuine hard working, decent people, such as the ones mentioned above, by cheating and scamming their way up the poker ladder.

And be in no doubt, they are defrauding people (if they are guilty), because a) if you take a transfer of $5000 from a player, direct to your own account or diverting it to other players' accounts on the understanding that any play chips it is converted to, played and then won with, will be returned to you as a conversion back into $, you increase your play money to $10000 and the agent or club then refuses to pay all or part of it to you, then they are defrauding you.

It is also fraud if an agent or club entices, lures or promotes to get a player to deposit (send funds), in the knowledge that the player will be playing against some or many colluders, so lose all or part of their money, because the agent or app club owner is profiting a percentage in (rake or juice) of the money lost by the player that was colluded against.

Two poker vloggers who I am hoping are not involved in promoting or being agents are TheTrooper97 and Lex O Poker. Both of these vloggers come across as genuine, hard working and honest people. I hope I am right about them, would be a big let down if I am not.

Regardless of the legality of it all. The stupidest thing to me from this is that these guys are banning winning players I had no idea this was going on. These guys are winning poker players marketing to guys who want to be winning poker players while simultaneously banning winning poker players. Do you not see the irony in that? Its one thing if its a small club but these apps have essentially become bigger then many poker sites. How would you feel if a poker site banned winning players?

Edit (additional info) re: Lynne Ji and her: To play with me on ClubGG go to http://*******/helloitslynne

It is possible that this is a perfectly honest affiliate promotion of ClubGG, which is a play money app, and that Lynne Ji is not
introducing the extra dimension of real money transfers to her or to other players in order to make it in effect a real money game.

It could be either, an innocent affiliate link that leads to playing against her with play chips, or what people like Yau/Moreno appear to be doing, according to accounts by posters in this thread.

Club GG does have some real purpose/real value, in so far as it is a method of playing a genuine "home game" among friends who are physically remote from each other, or even among friends in the same room, so that a dealer, chips and cards are not needed.

It also has an optional subscription model for $49.99 per month that has some attractive benefits.

Details of these are here: https://www.pokernews.com/free-onlin...%20tournaments.

However, it does seem that many people are using ClubGG to run illegal games and tournaments on, illegal because they are in effect for real money and tantamount to running an illegal online poker site.