Thomas Pinnock from Zenith poker is now involved in another controversy. This time, it is over a high stakes HU match between two players, Brown, his former student, and Paint, his new student, who he was secretly coaching, using Brown’s 210k hand DB with full hole cards. There are a lot of twists and turns in this. The first arbiter is a Zenith coach, which presents an obvious conflict of interest, on top of everything else. Solve4Why will be doing a podcast on this soon.
Here is how it went down:

• Brown and Paint agree to HU match. Paint then secretly starts working with Brown's former coach, Thomas Pinnock of Zenith Poker. That former coach devises a counter strategy to Brown using the database of 210k hands he has on him from the coaching, including 10-15k HU hands. This was Brown’s personal DB he gave him for coaching purposes.
• Paint is smashing Brown despite being a significant underdog at the start.
• Brown keeps trying to ask the arbiter to confirm his former coach is not coaching Paint. Eventually he finds out he is, and suspends the match to look into whether his DB is used.
• Paint and Zenith deny and attack. They called Brown a baby, loser, etc and said they were being defamed. Even up to the day before the arb ruling, they were going hard attacking Brown.
• Arbiter 1 finally resigns, since he works for and had equity in Zenith, and gets community pressure.
• A 5 person independent arbitration panel is formed to investigate. Pros such as Kevin Rabichow, Jeremiah Williams, and Mike Brady from Upswing chime in, linked in the Brown side of the story link below.
• Paint requests that Brown forfeit the match, and questions his integrity many times in the following document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r9N7jLVzCJ6UYVvOKepcXFPETZ9hoAi67woCSOUycvo/edit?usp=sharing
• After a long delay in producing the coaching videos to the arbitration panel, Paint/Zenith finally did release some of their coaching footage. Apparently, there is more footage of them directly discussing the conspiracy, but the footage below slipped through the cracks in their doctored release.
• Arbitrators rule that Paint did in fact cheat, based mainly on the video linked below. Paint then admits to the conspiracy, but only in a limited capacity, which really makes no sense, considering the coverup.

Cliffs: Player A’s former coach used his DB to coach Player B and device an exploitative counter strategy against Player A. The coach is Thomas Pinnock of Zenith Poker.

Links and sources:
Here is a link to the video of Zenith and Thomas Pinnock discussing the conspiracy to cheat:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...2_12-26-43.mp4
Here is a link to the arbitration decision:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...n_Decision.pdf
Here is a link to Brown’s side of the story: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen..._vs_Paint_.pdf
Here is a link to Paint requesting that Brown forfeit the match:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing
Here is a link to Paint’s side of the story:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...c022yzu9k/edit

Can only imagine 99% of people reading here wondering who the fk is paint / brown / pinnock / zenith.

Not surprised Pinnock is up to sketchy **** again.

Hope he gets what's coming to him.

If a guys cheating and caught what incentive does he have to give the money back. reps already gone little incentive run paint run. Maybe you can get the coach to give some back. Was there any bets?

paint and brown sounds like characters from an old must-read classic

I mean can’t say I’m at all surprised. The side bets are now the issue we have here.

lame as **** by the coach but not unexpected . **** like this happens all the time. Boxing coaches tell their new trainee about how the guy the use to coach is particularly weak to the left cross or whatever. In a nutshell if you hire a coach for whatever reason and part ways you better believe they're gonna weaponize any knowledge they've learned about you against you.

Thankfully, a lot of cheaters are ****ing dimwits, and obviously all of them are absolute scum.

Imagine giving up your entire hand history to some douche nobody (who the f is thomas pinnock and why would you pick him as a coach??) you dont even know. People getting coaching like this are dimwits.

Wtf this is actually bullish news for Zenith. I thought they were LARPers, but they coached some random lolreg to crush a $10Knl reg, who was being coached by KRabichow.


Agree with Mike Brady's thoughts tho. Wonder what he thought of when limitless was sending his stats/db to Doug Polk during his challenge vs buttonclickr, meanwhile Polk never disclosed that he was in a coaching arrangement with buttonclickr. Grey area or nah?

had not heard about the Iimitless/Doug collab. where did you hear of this?

Iimitless said it in some post-match interview with Joey, during his Fedor challenge

There were tons of bets

wow, this is a disgusting move. almost disgusting enough to be surprising, almost...

Pinnock is a punk

Interesting angles discussed in this thread.

Can you elaborate or at least provide your source for the betting action you describe ?

Were there any publicly disclosed staking arrangements involved as well ?

Who decided on how to arbitrate this or any other similar dispute ?

There may be a market for a third party service to provide such specialized services in a professional manner, across the industry.



(Like your screen name btw)

I mean I was one of the arbs

.

Hello, I am trying to fill that gap. I assisted in preparing and suggesting the legal guidelines that were used in this case, though I was not on the arbitration panel. My Twitter is here, as referenced by Berkey on his podcast today: https://twitter.com/PokerArbitrator

The match was hyped up on a large poker discord server (OTB), and there were tons of 3rd party side bets. The players themselves as well as some of the coaches had plenty of sidebets on the match.

No staking arrangements afaik.

The original arb recused himself. Both players agreed to a new panel of 5 arbitrators, presumably from their mutual contact list.

See above.

Matt Berkey did a podcast on this today. Details of the match start at 40 minutes in.

Zenith's new HU course is fire

This is a bad precedent for the coaching community.


Players will now want to make sure they have NDA's signed with their coaches. And even then, I'd be pretty cautious about sending my DB out after this fiasco.




Zenith guys clearly know the difference between "data mining" and getting a DB from a past coach. If we use their statement released today as a guide, it would be fair for a player to call up coaches and offer to pay for past students' DB's and/or coaching how to beat them.


This is the equivalent to insider trading.

Zenith poker have released a pr statement yesterday.

The 1 thing I don't get is the whole backstory to the challenge

1. Brandon pays for a data base review off of zenith.
2. Zenith are sent Brandon's data base of ~200k hands including somewhere between 5k and 11k hu hands from 2-3 years ago.
3. Zenith build a counter strategy for Cole (against Brandon in the challenge) based on the hu hands saved from the data base submission.

My points are:

• Did zenith ever provide the database review to Brandon for the hu hands?

• Did zenith suggest any Hu adjustments based on what they saw?

• 2 years has passed since the original Hu hands had been played. i) you'd like to think zenith gave some advice in the review ii) you would like to think Brandon improved as a Hu player in the meantime. THEREFORE surely the original Hu hands/saved database is far less relevant than it is claimed by Brandon's team?

I am looking forward to seeing the Hu challenge coaching recordings zenith said they were going to release.