Hey Doug, how about a straight yes or no for both. But especially that first one.

Cringey responses and was really hoping you wouldn't just play defense. You keep emphasizing you knew the same as anyone else, which may be true, but if your going to schill something this is part of the deal when it blows up. Seems like you want zero blowback after a statement video and brief q&a.

You've called people out for years and could have only done that with a squeaky clean rep. That is forever gone imo. Which is a shame as you've always been one of the good guys.

His rep is toast but he doesn't think so. Makes sense that with that tyoe of delusion he didn't recognize it was a scam/had no problem shilling it to his followers.


It's the hypocrisy that's bothers people the most.

Doug ignore the poortards, let the lawyers handle the defense - just enjoy the bag you made and move on.

Just don't word it? You made money promoting them and they probably paid you well over 6 figures for promoting them, so it seems disengenuous to say you didn't make money off this.

If you want sympathy cause you lost money too, at least reveal values.

Thanks ^^

One thing that Doug did not mention is the actual business model. I find it funny that Doug was there to ring the bells about Bitconnect, yet he apparently thought 15-20% APY is just defy crypto magic doing it's thing? Granted all these high yield scams aren't as blatant as Bitconnect, but at their core they are the same thing. It should be basic knowledge that those kind of rates are pure fantasy sustained (for a short while) by greed and debt and all it took was one market downturn for them all to unravel.

No, I dont assume fault. I did my due diligence, I talked to many references, and I promoted a product that I was told was fully collateralized. The moment it became clear it was not collateralized, I mobilized to leave the company. I am not at fault here.

I recognize that will be unpopular but it is the truth.

His response definitely seemed more like deflection of any blame off of him rather than an apology.


Did you at least get a kick out of the doug-polk-like video I did about you?

Unless I am able to cash in my coinflex tokens I have not made money from this. How else would you like me to say that? Its like you want to believe I made a bunch of money I did not make off of this.

If coinflex doesnt facilitiate payments I will end up losing money here.

---------

Guys, I know we want to paint me out like the bad guy who made a bunch of money here and got out but that isnt the case. You can call me dumb for being in the same spot as everyone else, but unless coinflex figures out how to process withdrawals I have not made money.

How is his entire reputation toast? It's not like he was the one that greenlit the non-collateralized loan. He basically leveraged his audience for CPM ad units, nothing more. His Youtube sponsor just happens to be a company that offers what is clearly an inherently high-risk product/activity. As someone who could give two craps about crypto and only cares about his poker content, I always simply ignored the crypto ads, which everyone is free to do. A high-risk investment YT sponsor going tits up doesn't change my opinion of Doug, especially when he's making an effort to distance himself immediately given the recent developments. I know enough to stay away from crypto because I prefer to lose my money at 5-card PLO.

How did you expect a crypto asset to pay a yield without assuming massive risk like being over leveraged?

Are you able to speak to why you left the money you were paid there instead of just moving it out?
Part of the contract?
Show of good faith?
Believed the money was safe and would grow?

I remember the quote from Michael Jordan who said Magic told him, "always give them your name to use, never give them your money"
I think rational people see that you are not the real villian here.
I dont get the sense of any type of malice on your part, but rather a belief in the wrong people/product
Occam's Razor applies here: You believed in them, you checked it out to the point you felt comfortable, and well, life happens.
I've been a hardcore crypto skeptic from the start, but fascinated by it

I like your cat avatar. I don't actually understand bitcoin lol

You were able to cash you coinflex tokens till last week. How much would you have made if you took out the tokens when they were credited to your account?

Just because you chose to keep the money with them, doesn't mean they didn't pay you. "I invested more money with the scammers, than the money they paid me for helping scam you" isn't that great of a defence.

Edit: Not saying you were scamming anyone knowingly. Unfortunately if they were saying all loans were colaterized and thats not the case, they must be called a scam.

My wife is a Hello Kitty fanatic and she likes the avatar as well.

The majority of the blowback here is from someone that has 19 posts, or the typical trolls, so take it with a grain of salt. I think the lesson to be learned is probably the promotion of a product that could potentially cost people significantly without having any real influence. For example, people are going to be far more willing to trust the Lodge because you are an owner than they would any random Texas cardroom. I think there was the perception that you are well connected enough in the crypto space to represent a company where you had some sort of controlling of voting interest on the product, and that your backing would hold far more weight than Hellmuth for example (although I find him to be a big problem as well).

Think the majority of the posters are unfamiliar or willfully ignorant of the contributions you have made, particularly to online poker. A lot of us have been around for long enough when you were contributing strategy on this forum. You also have put out enough free content that would at least be enough to make losing players winners at small stakes for close to a decade now, let alone starting a training site. I guess some people are turned off to poker players who have enough guts to call other pros out either for cheating, scummy behavior, what you believe to be poor political or moral stances, or simply not being as good as they claim to be. I actually really admire this whether I agree with you or not, especially coming from someone that was willing to challenge anyone HU for the highest stakes.

In the end, I have been playing for a living for 16 years, constantly I am let down by the poker community for the cheating, or seeking edges at any opportunity. I don't think that is what you did here at all, I think it was just a mistake that we wish you did not make given your experience and current position in poker which is more of a gatekeeper for the integrity of poker rather than an active member.

Agreed with Balbomb above. Aside from some cheeky phrasings I don't think Doug did anything wrong and his rep isn't shot or anything close. I don't see the big deal tbh. There's something there but not as big of a canvas as people want to paint.

If you can help me access my 2006 reg 2+2 account maybe that would meet your threshold for posting. I made my money from BTC and left the poker community but glad you're gatekeeping, keep up the noble work, enjoy your grind.

Agree. And "conned" implies that there was some elaborate plot for which Polk fell prey, with Mark Lamb steepling his fingers in a dark room going "excellent... excellent..."

I got trashed for saying this 11 years ago, but there was an extent to which I defended Full Tilt Poker in that it did not set out to be a scam. Rather, it was simply a poorly run business that only later began employing many shady strategies – including that of a Ponzi scheme – to keep the lights on.

Similarly, it's quite possible that CoinFlex is not a scam and never intended to be one, but rather was a legitimate business operating on a rather precarious foundation. Or maybe it had a solid business plan, but it simply didn't work out. Crypto is still the Wild West. There's no go-to-market strategy that someone can have where people would think, yep, that's tried, true and tested.

It's an admittedly loose analogy, but this would be like someone opening up a store in Los Feliz, Calif. that specifically sells space heaters. Then they enlist residents Leo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling to become celebrity spokesmen for it. Of course, selling Laskos and De’Longhis in a city whose weather is warmer in November than London's in July is laughable. So don't be surprised when said business goes belly-up and declares bankruptcy before the end of the first fiscal year, leaving more than a few creditors holding the bag.

Would you think a little less of those two actors for putting their name on a business with so little chance to succeed? More than fair. But it would be an incredibly stupid leap in logic to say Leo and Gosling must automatically be scammers who are "worse than Lederer and Ferguson" and belong in jail.

That said...

I would be very interested to hear the answer to fast11375's question... what exactly was this due diligence? Obviously, assets and liquidity had to be high on the list, but even if those are off the charts, it must be damn near impossible to ascertain the prospects of any business in this space. I know due diligence often entails little more than checking off some boxes that you can later cite to CYA.

Doug Polk is getting quite a bit of hate in this thread, but it's altogether likely that his ambassadorship of Coinflex came from a place of naivete or just plain gamble, but not nefariousness.

Did you verify the account balances? Did you look at a balance sheet? Did you look at a statement of cash flows?


Did the contract you signed have a stipulation that they would have players funds kept safe? It’s nice to ask people things, but unless you see the accounts and you have contracts, peoples words are almost pointless.

I'm not questioning his integrity, but his rep took a huge hit.

Doug had a reputation as a sharp and honest guy. After the high yeld, low risk investment he promoted and invested hard in turns out to go bust after loaning a huge amount of its reserves to a shady figure he knew was a big investor, but didn't warn anyone, some of that rep has to go.

People don't want to pay for poker coaching or buy products advertised by someone who was the most visible face in promoting a scam. In several reddit threads there are people @ Doug on the crypto subreddit and I didn't see anyone else mentioned.


Hey Doug I don't think you were trying to scam anyone, but why didn't you disclose Roger Ver was a investor in the company? You said it was what gave you the most pause about being in the company(maybe not these exact words, but not trying to twist anything), seems it could be relevant to other potential investors.

It's crazy how in your video you say you stepped down from CoinFLEX because the damage to your reputation was becoming too much. The natural and expected reason to step down would be because you realised the damage you were doing to your hundreds of thousands of followers. You should have realised how much of a scam the coin you were promoting was, and that should have been reason enough to stop promoting CoinFLEX. Even if you truly couldn't see how likely it was that CoinFLEX was a scam from the very beginning (and it's very difficult to see how one wouldn't at least assign a substantial % probability to this), once you realised the insane loan they admitted to making you should have known 100% that you were promoting a scam to followers. Your focus should not have been on your reputation. Your focus should have been on doing whatever it took to minimise the damages you were doing to your loyal fans as a result of your promotion of the scam CoinFLEX. You keep talking about PR - but, honestly, who could care less about PR? what matters is stopping your fans from being scammed.

Also, I am not sure why the Lodge shouldn't have its reputation tarnished for this. Aren't you still a co-owner of the Lodge? I will obviously never play in a cardroom you own and I suggest that no one else does either.

P.S. You took money to promote CoinFLEX. If you lost money some other way (e.g. by having money on CoinFLEX, or by losing to the CoinFLEX owners at poker, or etc.), sorry but that isn't even slightly relevant, except perhaps insofar as it is even more evidence of just how poor your judgement is.

In your reddit thread you've said that you "had no knowledge of the operations of this company other than what was available publicly". So did you do due diligence when you started, then didn't follow up at all in the 6+ months you were with them? What due diligence did you undertake aside from just asking around?

You said as little as six weeks ago that flexUSD was "1:1 fully redeemable by USDC" and that CoinFLEX isn't the stabilizing force for the coin. As flexUSD is now trading sub .50 can you admit this wasn't true?

Were you aware that there weren't enough reserves for a run and this was completely reliant on one person allegedly needing to meet a margin call?

Did you believe the promised returns were sustainable? If so, why?

Definitely a missed opportunity for a "What's up guys? Doug Polk here." entrance.

I never got involved with CoinFlex, but I considered it on the simple fact of your endorsement. I think that's what a lot of people are upset about.

Given your reputation and how much you value it, they figured CoinFlex was a reputable and trustworthy platform to use. One thing that really stood out to me was the fact to this point, you hadn't taken on a YT sponsor. It wasn't just another YouTuber shilling another company. Instead, it was you who operates in two very, at times, nefarious spaces. Meaning you're very careful in you who you support, what you support and what you attach your name to. I could tell how much it meant to you to finally take on a channel sponsor and that by itself gave me confidence in the platform.

And I will say, a lot of posters seem to think due diligence means CoinFlex should have opened their entire operation to you. At the end of the day (from what it sounds like), you were being paid for marketing and you had no stake or financial risk in the company other than what they agreed to pay you or what you chose to invest. CoinFlex certainly had no obligation to open their entire operation to you. Whether you should have taken the risk of endorsing a company knowing there was information they could (and did) withhold is a risk you decided to take. Unfortunately, it didn't work out.

Clearly, you thought the company was worth staking your name on. It sucks they let you down. I don't fault you for that. I'm just disappointed for you and the fact that whether you like it or not or whether it's fair or not, your word among supporters has definitely taken a hit. It hasn't for me, because I truly think you had no idea and that you still had your best intentions at hand. But I understand those who are upset, especially the ones who lost dollars or coins using CoinFlex based on your endorsement.