As a moderator of the forum aren't you meant to be impartial and not take sides?

It's nothing new though....everyone knows about the biases that exist on this forum and the wrath that's taken against those that speak against the "elite 2p2 circle"

I noticed that Mr José started blocking people on twitter so they can't write to him asking legit questions. Nothing to hide of course though...

What is this accomplishing? Say what you want about the various conspiracy theories, but I think the questions being asked about Girah are valid and fair. The guy was caught cheating - you don't think people should be at all curious about what else could be going on?

Cheating is clearly ubiquitous among high stakes regs. PA was outed just recently for multi-accounting. Why should people not inquire about this?

we get your point already. It's pure speculation on the broke haters' part. Agreed.

But hey those speculations only came up after girah got caught cheating and refused to come clean.

is he not allowed to make a joke? Making a joke has nothing to do w/him taking sides.

what is this elite 2p2 circle, where can I sign up?

It's so interesting how those who choose to hate can only hate and can't see any other way.

lol at your definition of a joke

Serious question: if someone wants to take him up on his bet - who will be escrow?

Asking questions ≠ hating

For the millionth time, you should consider that you're posting in NVG before you claim everyone is hating on a high stakes reg.

In case you haven't connected the dots, NVG is enamored with Ivey, Dwan, Isildur, etc. Why on earth would NVG arbitrarily decide to hate on Girah?

I would like a 10k penalty for pulling out

a respected HSNL reg will do, we will have no problems getting one we can trust if this means a deathmatch actually goes down for once

don't get your hopes up. I've seen regs that talk more trash than he does at me and they've never accepted.

well spotted did you also read my last sentence from that post...?

As well as the backer fiasco let's not forget that Jose has yet to demonstrate the caliber of play that would have been required to sustain the win rates that were claimed in OP. Sure he speaks great English and seems to be capable of high-level analysis of poker hands, that is off the felt however.

It's clear by now that Jungleman and Jose are close, one has coached and possibly mentored and staked the other and furthermore, now Jose claims that they plan to share a house together. Someone previously suggested that perhaps in return for the use of Jose's identity in order to open accounts to play on Eurosites-Jungleman offered him coaching. As Rangey surmised, it's also conceivable that other high stakes players partook in the use of the accounts created under Jose's name.

Sure this might sound like a conspiracy theory because I agree it's shady, but the kid just hasn't shown the skills required to crush the game for say 11bb/100. Game softness on the Merge Network is similar to that found on Eurosites so if Jose was able to consistently crush on Eurosites then he shouldn't have a problem crushing on Merge. Maybe his game has now evolved to the point where JM is willing to stake him vs. Isildur or Durrrr but if it has we've yet to witness it.

Gregorio. G-Man. Greggy-baby. I appreciate this effort, it's funny and nicely written. But it could have been equally effective and amusing without the need to resort to fabricating so many aspects of the 'alternative hypothesis', stuff that nobody has actually claimed... if you're going to make stuff up to make us sound ridiculous, why not include Jews and lizards in your post lol...

I'll accept there's a whole bunch of speculation going on from my part. But nobody who is at all objective can possibly deny that:

a) there are a ton of holes in the official story that don't make sense. You just don't see these kinds of holes in the stories of legit online superstars. But you do see them time and time again when there is something shady going on.

b) Lock confirmed that on at least one occasion, someone else played on the girah account from a different location - and this is just one of many unspecified violations. Are the Lock investigation team jealous hater conspiracy theorists?

c) Over 2 months ago, a few very straightforward questions were asked of Jose, requesting easily providable information which would clear his name entirely. He's simply ignored them for months. You see this time and time again when someone has something to hide; when someone can prove his/her innocence, they always immediately provide the information in their defence.

~~~~~

Look, I may well be completely off about the ghosting theory and other things I've suggested. If you read all my posts you'll see I carefully word them and have never claimed I know what's really going on; I've just been thinking of how to make sense of all the holes in the official story. You asked before if there was any 'proof' to what has been suggested. You do realise this begs the question don't you? We've been asking for that proof. We don't have it, one person does and we can't understand why he refused to provide it when it would end all of this.

For all the people defending Jose, I fully understand. But try to imagine he wasn't your friend / hero / whatever - imagine you had no side in this game whatsoever. Look at the abc points I've listed above. You can't tell me that anybody can be surprised that people are going to be suspicous. No such suspicion was aimed at XWINK during his insane run on FTP (4k to $2m in a few days lol) - the primary accusations against him were that he was a fish on a heater due to his 'unorthodox' style of play combined with suicidal BRM. But not once did anybody suggest anything shady going on, because everything was transparent. There weren't any holes.

There's an easy solution to all this - provide the information that was asked for months ago and everybody will be happy - especially Jose surely. I'll also become an official girah fanboy and will apologise profusely. Until then, with all the unanswered questions, nobody can be surprised at the deep levels of suspicion prevalent in this thread.

I'm not taking any sides. I have an opinion, which is pretty clear, but I've also said it's based on nothing other than my personal opinion, the same one that would have never believed stox could ever do anything shadey until it became obvious that he was cheating.

What rankles me even more than the people who think girah is not who he says, are the people who are throwing around allegations against jungleman that he is using that account to multiaccount. Those accusations are completely baseless afaik, and it's pretty ****ty to post things like below about jungleman without any proof. Is there any shred of evidence that Jungleman ever played on girah's account? I think anyone making accusations like this without offering proof should be banned. Jungelman has a good name in the poker community and people shouldn't accuse him of multiaccounting without proof.

It is posts like what I quoted above that undermine the credibility of any of the accusations in this thread because it just seems like a lot of people talking out of their ass.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HASEEB WOULD TELL JUNGLEMAN TO HAVE GIRAH POST ON THIS ACCOUNT IF THIS WERE A GIRAH GIMMICK.

.

Confirmed lol

Actually officially I don't, or at least I shouldn't... this whole thing is really getting in the way of my research. Procrastination is a powerful force

ah, CAPS LOCK... the ultimate stylistic devastation of the credibility of a claim. Looks fun, let me have a go.

I WON'T RESPOND FOR MONTHS TO REQUESTS TO PROVIDE EVIDENCE WHICH WOULD CLEAR MY NAME BECAUSE... YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF HATERS.

LOL!!! Wow, when you put it in CAPS it really sounds absurd...

I think you got levelled bud.

Pretty sure I didn't actually... Gregorio, it's obvious from my response that I understood what your CAPS post meant isn't it? i.e. you were making a crazy conspiracy theory claim to explain Syous' perfectly reasonable comment, thereby undermining the various conspiracy theory claims in this thread?

Man, why must I always have to try to defend myself when I'm wrongly accused of something...? It's almost like there's an innate driving force within me as a human to prove my innocence as soon as possible when I have the means to do so!

lol. Also, gg in this thread in general.

Dialectics are for haters dude.

Rangey Mc.-
I am very impressed with your work itt. Your diligent research and ability to dodge all the "lots of haters 'round here!"s are commendable. Keep up the hard work, it always pays off in the big picture.

There are so many similarities between this story and so many past scandals. The only way to get anywhere is to keep digging. If there was nothing shady it would be so easy to clear up by the innocent party...

Do you have even the vaguest notion of how ridiculous you sound?

Someone PM'd me girah's merge PTR to prove how good he is. I'd like to apologise now for my earlier post where I referenced the fact that his HEM screenshot showed losses for 91% of his hands but winnings of over $167k for 9% of his hands at 25/50 and above.

It's clear from his PTR that Jose is definitely not a losing player and I'm sorry if my post implied that in any way (I never actually thought this, like I said many times I fully believe that he's a great player). He has definitely been a winning player overall at Merge.

Based on his up to date Merge PTR, over 41k hands, girah is winning at 5.88bb/100 which gives him a PTR rating of 62 (warm). That's a great winrate, no doubt about that. Not double digits like the original screenshot in the OP from the last year, but nonetheless very very good. Admittedly he's still losing at -4.76bb/100 at 2/4 6-max, and also losing at -12.03bb/100 at 3/6 6-max, but for the majority of hands played, which is at 10/20 6-max, he's been winning at 7.71bb/100. I hereby declare that this is an excellent winrate. His 10/20 HU results aren't quite as good, for those hands he's been losing at -9.57bb/100.

One weird thing though: there are only 211 hands showing at 25/50 on his PTR (losing at -3.75bb/100) and nothing at all for higher stakes - which is a bit strange since according to his HEM screenshot which is for Merge, he won $167k at 25/50, 50/100 & 100/200 over a couple of thousand hands. I presume those hands just weren't recorded by PTR.

I'm not the first to notice, put it that way. People have been banned for very minor things in the past related to certain higher profile members on these forums.

Thanks dude The haters defence is meaningless and has no substance, so it's easy to dodge tbh.

There have been occasions on this issue where someone has picked me up on a mistake I've made and I've immediately acknowledged it - e.g. I quoted Sauce saying that Jose had gone from noob to crushing 10/20 within 6 months, when apparently it was more like 8-10 months, and Sauce had his numbers wrong - straight away I said "fair enough" to that. And just now I've apologised and set the record straight for my misleading earlier post with Jose's HEM screenshot - which may have been interpreted as an accusation of him being a losing player, when in fact his subsequent results on PTR prove he obviously isn't (it wasn't actually the point I was making but still). I'm more than happy to admit being wrong when information demonstrates that I'm wrong.

To be honest, I don't actually care about all this in any real sense (I appreciate this sounds bizarre given the mass of text I've contributed on the subejct lol). There's a ton of shady stuff going on not just in the poker world but everywhere and I ignore 99.99999999% of it. My thing is purely that I just love wrestling with puzzles, they intrigue the hell out of me, and I just happened to be following this one which had a ton of alarm bells ringing off. I really couldn't care less if Jose ends up being a multi-billionnaire Emperor of Portugal with a thousand supermodel wives, best of luck to him seriously. I just really, really want to know what the hell's going on with all the holes in the story