Cliffs:

-Elaborate scheme w/ some real kid (Girah) acting as a front (for a cut obv) for High Stakes players to take advantage of unknowing players on euro site/sites

-Possibly including well known US High Stakes players such as Jungleman, Sauce, and Haseeb.

-Stay tuned, more to come.

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Also thanks to RangeyMcTripleMerge for his "artistic impression" here, probably went somethign like this:

Some years ago, post-UIGEA, some high-stakes player in the US - let's call them "Munglejan", "Bashee" and "Cause" were solemnly looking back on the good old days when they could crush at 10bb+/100. It was becoming ever more difficult to maintain a decent edge; the swings could be utterly brutal. They lamented at the enormous pool of European players on other sites on which they were not permitted to play. So many wonderfully ******ed donks... so close, yet so far.

One of the players decided to throw caution to the wind and set up an account on a Euro site using a young friend's information and playing behind seven proxies. In exchange for the use of his information, the youngster would be offered 5% of all profits made.

The first few weeks entailed levels of plunder not witnessed since the Viking era. "You would not ****ing believe the **** these morons will call you down with!!!!", he exclaimed to his buddies. Months went by without a problem.

Eventually the other two were overwhelmed with temptation and decided to join in, sharing the same account and then creating new ones for the various skins the network had to offer. This was beyond their wildest dreams; not for years had making money from poker been so effortless.

A year or two passed. By that time, the plucky trio had amassed a whopping $2 million in profit! The saying goes, however, mo' money, mo' problems. There was a growing concern that their luck would soon run out and they would be caught. Word would surely get around about these accounts the more they cleaned up. It was only a matter of time before people would ask who the mystery millionnaire holdem wizard was...

Rather than wait until questions were asked, why not 'out' the young fellow pre-emptively as some kind of 'poker prodigy', so that the story could be controlled from the very start? The 'outing' would need to be subtly done though, and certainly not by one of the trio themselves. So one had the idea of a fake 2+2 account from Portugal claiming to be someone 'searching' for this young poker prodigy. A young poker player, he claimed, had won over $2 million over the past 2 years, and was willing to pay money in return for information regarding his whereabouts. Of course, this worked like a charm, and the collective balls of NVG gurgled with delight at the prospect of discovering who this child genius was.

Finally, this thread arrived, with a beautifully written biography on José written by Bashee along with screenshots of the trio's epic motherf***ing winrates. But no screennames were provided for obvious reasons. How to explain this omission, he asked? "Say your lawyer has forbidden you or some sh*t, they'll lap it up" was the response. He also asked what to say when people saw he wasn't wallowing in riches despite having apparently won over $2 million. Hmmmm... "just say you don't really buy much stuff, you're not into that consumer crap", one of them suggested. "Hey", said the other, "just tell them you got scammed for a ton of cash! Credibility and sympathy in one stroke, booya!"

It all went smoothly for some time, with José even acquiring a sponsorship deal from Lock Poker! Worrying times were afoot however, when some players had claimed that the player they had seen on the Girah account was an 'average', 'weak' or 'meh' reg at best, who was playing far below the kind of stakes indicated in the initial screenshot, and, moreover, losing substantially. This was, of course, the real José playing at those times. An ok player at those stakes, but certainly no genius prodigy. Fortunately, just in time for the Bluff challenge with a day to spare, Munglejan logged in and tore some dude a new one heads-up, giving the girah account the prize. Some people questioned this sudden amazing last-minute run, indicating that they had not even seen girah play heads up before.

Finally, Lock disqualified José from the competition, citing 'another player using his account from another location' as one of the reasons for the disqualification. They didn't mention the other reasons. José tried to explain what happened but it all seemed a tad unusual, with holes creeping in everywhere. Some posters asked specific questions in order for his name to be cleared.

The trio let out a collective "fffuuuuu" and told José never to post in the thread again. And he never did...

This is just random gossip and I know nothing of the situation, but I did find it odd that viffer said like 2-3 months back before this outing of girah (viffer being a person who I am quite confident knows nothing about online poker especially euro sites) said there is some portugese stud out there who is killing it online. Connections to ashman (friendly with viffer) and to jungleman (roomate of ashman) would not be a hard connection to find.

edit: I could obviously have that all wrong though as I don't have the best of memories.

Since DublingUp's cliffs were ridiculous I figured I'll give you more accurate cliffe. These are short, but there are longer ones posted before so if you want more details you'll have to look around:

-Jose comes in, confirms he is 'Portugese Poker Prodigy'
-People start to question his authenticity since his English is apparently far too good. He has an interview on Pokerstatic, some people continue to think it's fake.
-Skip forward a while, Jose becomes a pro for Lock (a skin on the Merge network)
-Jose (Girahh) wins a Merge competition/promotion by playing a big HU session at nosebleeds vs a new opponent on the last day of the challenge (and winning a lot, obv). He was playing much lower stakes like 1knl (I think) pretty much the whole challenge before this, and multiple people who have played with him report that in their opinion he is an average 1knl reg at best
-Someone makes a thread about how its suspicious, it gets locked
-Merge disqualifies Jose from winning the competition
-Jose comes in with an explanation saying that it was because of multiple people using his account. He says that he has a backer and the backer logged in to play a few hands of PLO and that's it. Shows a few screenshots
-Things don't add up with the post, people become very suspicious.
-He makes another post clearing a few things up, but many things left up in the air. For example, the fact that no Lock rep or his backer have posted ITT to verify his statements.
-Since then the thread has been haters saying he's a filthy cheater and anyone who believes otherwise is a ******, fanbois calling the haters ******ed and a few reputable people offering bets that Jose and his story are legit. Those bets have not been taken, and no new information has come to light so really everyone's just guessing at this point.

Although I'm a believer of Jose (or just a fanboi) I tried to be objective in this, but I may have missed a lot. If I have then just find the other cliffs buried in this massive thread.

All valid thoughts. I would say that it doesn't follow necessarily that if someone is playing on one site that they're too busy to play on another, lots of people do that. And if you're busy hunting then you're not playing. And if you're hunting regs, that seems to imply that action isn't very forthcoming - I don't think I'm being too controversial when I say even the most ego-driven poker players would prefer to play fish than regs Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if Jungleman has no dodgy input into this whatsoever. But the holes in the official story are too large, and too pervasive, so it understandably invites speculation (plausible or otherwise).

Whoever the agents might be here, the fact is that the notion of someone else playing on the girah accounts, with Jose being the official account-holder, explains most if not all the unanswered questions & holes in this story. And this is bolstered by the fact that Lock disqualified him from the competition precisely because they found someone else playing on his account from a different ip address. The more a theory can explain empirical data, the more credibility it possesses over alternative ones. At present, imo, the conspiracy theory of some US players using Jose as a front to play on Euro sites is not at all established and not even close to being rock solid - it's speculation of course. But it makes more sense than the official story, which just has too many unanswered questions - and we've been here so many times before in the poker world, something looks out of place, more stuff comes out, then more, then finally it's clear that there's some dodgy sh*t going down...

Pretty decent cliffs actually, nice one.

Would just like to add on my part that I think Jose is a really, really likeable kid, very intelligent and well-spoken and obviously a solid player based on how he converses about the game. The world would be a much, much better place if more people were like him. The thing is, if the conspiracy theory turns out to be true, then if anything he'll have been a pawn rather than a mastermind so to speak.

But yeah, just to compare - I'm a fanboi of Antonius but that doesn't mean I don't consider him dodgy as hell for his epic MA'ing at FTP...

Good post, since the rest is more of a statement than discussion I'll just focus on this bit. You are right that being busy on one site doesn't mean a player isn't looking to play on another site. What I meant with jungleman specifically is that there never seemed to be a time (before everyone thought he was the best and he was waiting at nosebleeds all day) where he wasn't just constantly battling regs. He's actually said there's not a single person he's ever sat out below 5/10 too so I can't imagine he was waiting around for action much then, and also that he actively sought out the best reg at most levels before moving up. When he was moving up the NL games weren't as dead as they are now, so I can't imagine huge gaps in the action tbh.

After he was playing 25/50 it seemed to be a pretty quick progression from getting his ass beat ---> crushing everyone ---> getting crushed by isildur ----> crushing everyone again ----> durrrr challenge. Doesn't leave much time to mastermind a level like this, and anything after that was too recent for him to be implicated in this business (imo).

He's also said a few times he's in poker for the glory (infamy) and not really for the money. His career reflects that, he has practised almost 0 game selection. Not that I doubt he has money on his mind but I can't really see someone who approaches poker like that doing something like this.

Basically what I'm saying is that Jungleman doesn't seem like the kinda player to do something like this, and the timing doesn't fit imo.

edit: I forgot to say that I agree 100% with your second paragraph, no doubt

Havent seen him play anyone higher than 10-20 since the Lock Poker challenge.

Some Cliffs please... What made people think that jungleman haseeb and sauce where trying to fraud??

I'm guessing this is aimed at the people who stated that ITT? As I said I was giving a cliffs of the thread, so that includes opinions people have posted that contribute towards the doubt. If so the facepalm below is an addition to your thoughts, if not the facepalm is directed at you. Either way I gotta post it, ripped fresh from an ep of Death Note I literally just watched

I am new to this site, and I have just made this account because i readed the complete threat and this is the pretty clear truth. It is so obvious that is embarrasing to hear people who say the believe that portuguese guy.

It was funny too to see how that ugly mother****er was trying to convince everyone that he did just help the poor portuguese to made the page, write the first post, etc...

I forgot to include this in my cliffs, so just read that a few posts above and then: Haseeb's name comes into it because he was the one who wrote/edited Jose's OP and some site of Jose's was registered in his name (again, I think). Sauce and Jungleman were the first HSNLers to 'confirm' his existence in the first thread about him and talk about how dedicated he is etc. I think that's the extent of it, but someone can add more if that's wrong.

Are you saying that you really believe that he ("Bashee") made the page, and he edited the first post just to help? are you serious?

What? Jesus christ, where do you ******s come from? I wasn't even sharing an opinion of whether Haseeb is involved or not, I'm telling somebody that's why people are connecting Haseeb to Jose. l

As for what I actually believe, tbh I don't know anymore. Partly because I can't remember that well (especially in regards to what Haseeb said about his involvement with this thread/the site), partly because things are looking more shady every day the people in question don't post and partly because I don't give a **** anymore. Fk this, I've posted way too much ITT today, back to Death Note.

I can't believe that someone who just said this:
is callling me ******.

I come from Spain btw, if you are interested.

PMd

Haseeb said ITT that he edited the OP, and it was also confirmed ITT that he purchased the domain name, which he never denied. So yeah all of that is correct according to this thread.

Federal Legislation in the United States is neccesary, and moving forward, stories like this should serve as prime examples as to why.

Use this thread/story as a microcosm, of everything that was wrong with online poker prior to Black Friday, and why it needed to happen.

Ok but are these all speculations? Or is there any real proof?

No, not really. Your cliffs come from another jealous haters perspective.

For one

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/7...ockpokerha.png

It seems pretty true that he has played 5/10 as most of his hands, what i'm contesting is the information as you present it.

Why wouldn't you include the fact that action at high stakes nl on merge shouldn't be that common? As far as I am reading, Girah has been very
active in seeking out high stakes action on Merge.

Supposing this true, wouldn't you be itching to play any poker at all after signing for this site? IT is very common for a "high stakes reg" to play
lower if he can not seek action. Many pros open up 3/6 - 25/50
tables when seeking Heads Up Action.

You don't see any reason why a Merge network reg could be possibly
jealous of his success.
If his screen shot showed his stats of 5,000-10,000 hands
of 25/50 (which couldnot happen?) with his 100k+ banked at a super winrate,
would nvg be satisfied?

"Things don't add up with the post". Sure it's cliffnotes, but you have
no information here. You may aswell have stuck with another "things get suspicious" type bullet point.



Why would a lock poker representative or his backer come into this thread to verify anything. What exactly is the information that people are seeking out.

As far as I see it, Girah should perhaps "prove" himself if he is doubted
by a respected member of the poker community, who needs
clarification on clear inconsistencies in his story. This has not been the case.

Why are skeptics considered jealous haters? Isn't NVG comprised almost entirely of fanboys who worship the ground that Ivey, Dwan, Antonius, Isildur et al walk on?

I think people are skeptical purely because they don't trust this story...

Moreover, there are a multitude of reasons that people question this whole thing, and the stakes he plays is not really one of the biggest issues.

Personally I'd rather this story be completely true because it's fun to rail and especially with the US players not online anymore.

And honestly I don't see how it would be a "waste of time" for him to justify himself in this thread. He should be able to answer most questions fairly quickly and easily. I think the way you're perceived by 2p2 and the general poker community is at least vaguely important to most poker pros. People like to say he doesn't owe it to anyone to communicate in this thread, but it seems like it's in his best interest to do so...

lol at not responding, he's obviously constructing some new lies

When you say "he" i guess you mean "Bashee" and his two other friends...

Ok, here's a 'cliffs' compiliation of quotes on the whole thing - in relation to the more interesting/unusual aspects of the story. Make of them what you will.

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From the original poster who was searching for the poker prodigy


Haseeb response in that thread:

Sauce's response:


Comment from same thread re: loads of new 2+2 members confirming his existence:

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Quotes from this thread:



Interesting quote here - why would two separate people need to proof-read Jose's story? especially when Jose's English is clearly excellent anyway?:

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