As for Sorel, he is an excellent player and a truly innovative donkamenter. All the moves everyone uses today were mastered by him and Annette and whoever else back in 06/07... Truly one of the original Lagtards. I think his response was pretty good, but prolly too little too late. He deserves a 2nd chance, but if he ever gets involved in some shady garbage again I'd have no problem with everyone blasting him

this is just so entirely wrong. There was a precedent set for it, every1 knew it was wrong, including sorel. I remember when it happened, the idea of taking over for some1 occurred to all of us who were making bank back then. It even occured to me, but I knew damn well if I logged into some1's account and took over I would be banned. Your memory might be off or something, but this wasn't as far back as you think. The ActionJeff thing is a bad comparison, and the TOS on both sites clearly stated that this action was infact, illegal.

this would be chance 3, no?

if your trying to be apologetic then do it don't come up with half assed excuses of why you did what you did jesus you must be half ******ed

I second that!

I'm pretty sure these 2+2 really look forward to this kind of stuff and go on a feeding frenzy. Damn YOU PEOPLE...oops, I post here too!

But really, as long as investigations reveal no wrongdoing I think you are handling this well by openly addressing THESE PEOPLE!

CONTROVERSY SELLS, i.e. 50 cent...no more recent controversy from 50 and I haven't seen any of his music videos.

As long as youre not pulling any bollshet anymore...fuhgedaboudit! It's important your peers respect you and have a proper understanding...but I think most of the 2+2 flamers and trolls are microstakes donks, like me, who watch way too much TV.

P.S. Who are you?
Sorrel Mizzi--don't know you're entire story...but stick to the official investigation stance, if they clear you all good but if not...I dunno!

good job taking that completely out of context buddy.

i defintely think we as his peers have a right to judge him and the community has done a ton to out scammers, cheaters, etc. but what i meant was the punishment he received was unjust for the crimes he was convicted of, and we dont have a right to say he deserves that punishment anyway because of things we assume he was doing without actual proof of it.

his playing while banned is really bad, but that isnt what he was punished for. the buying account thing and the pokerstars takeover situation didnt warrant the respective lifetime/3month bans

i think its irresponsible of him to come on and blast all of online poker and make an implication that live poker is completely free of all shadiness. yea i got out of line there and i apologize, but every single time any scandal pops up that comment shows up. is stuff like that posted in the deeb "media people looking at hole cards and telling other players" thread?

i can think of tons of shady **** ive seen or heard of, let me name some stuff just off the top of my head:

-men the master is still allowed to play live tourneys and he probably stole many many thousands in equity from live players, we all know what kind of **** he was pulling
-a few years back the main event final table had something like 20 million more chips on it than the tournament started with. cannot be accounted for by "chipping up" as norman chad suggested
-sorel getting ****ed over for hundreds of thousands of euros by that german guy is still something not many people know about, and people who do know about it often say things like "lol karma he deserves it" instead of being worried about that happening in live tourneys or cash games. it happened to wayyyy more than just sorel. im sorry to any of these guys if they dont want their names dropped, but william thorson, elky, alec torelli, there were a few others i dont really remember everyone but it was at least 10 diff guys got ****ed over
-ive witnessed multiple times people colluding at tables (at bay101 and the commerce) im at and the floor not doing **** about it because they were regulars or the floor or dealers were somehow in on it
-the foxwoods wpt final table that durrrr made, he said there were marked cards found while the FT was going on....i mean jesus christ, i never notice stuff like this because i have bad eyesight and i dont look for it, i wonder how many times its happened to me
-dont even need to talk about all of the shady angle shoots live players try to pull against internet guys who arent always used to playing live and the rules that go on there

shady **** goes on everywhere. there is shady **** going on in tons of casinos and live players love coming into threads like this, sweeping all of that under the rug and talking about how bad internet poker is and how they avoid it because its shady. i know there are problems online, but the implication is that no problems exist live which is just ludicrous.

i have never been much of an online tourney player and maybe missed the discussion on buying accounts, but i remember the pca lobby conversations when ak87 made the final table, and i remember the actionjeff story coming out. i didnt even know multiaccounting was possible until the jjprodigy/zeejustin threads came out and were discussed over on liquidpoker as well because i only played cash back then, but it just seemed like there was a different precedent in the case of account buying. its clearly clearly a very wrong thing but man jeff buying an account, the 07 pca and sorel buying an account were not THAT far apart in time (less than a year) for massive jumps in rule changes to be made, and if no massive jump was made then sorel probably should have received a lesser penalty is all im saying.



and mement, how have you not seen the entire show yet? i mean if you havent seen it all and are worried about spoilers i assume you started watching like a week ago and havent finished marathoning yet, pretty small window for me to spoil for you

AFTER reading the entire thread like i should've before my first post...

iFail

Sounds like sorel has done many wrongs and is beyond his second chance...and shaun deeb responding like he did went along with my respect from your peers reasoning, doesnt seem like he's to positive on you!

Don't dress like a woman or use tampons at women's tourney's anymore shaun...even though i don't know you well, not coo IMO.

You sound like a POS in terms of ethics and integrity in poker, this isn't the shady backroom games of Doyle's time.

my .02

First of all, buying an account deep in a tourney is a huge deal. That's stealing like 5 figures in equity. You go to jail for a long time for **** like that outside of the weird gambling world.

But, this is the gambling world and ****'s weird, and we have our own rules about this crap that sometimes are pretty vague or at least not well advertised. So maybe you could argue his punishment was too severe. I sympathise a lot with that argument, as I said earlier.

Fortunately, the shady weird gambling world where sometimes people sorta cheat and get caught and get punished too severely has a solution to this problem: People get forgiven eventually. ZeeJustin plays on Stars and FTP now. He even gets invited to play on TV and ****. People don't get forgiven when they continue cheating, though, like OP did.

So, while technically OP got a lifetime ban from FTP for buying an account, in reality he got a temporary ban from FTP for buying an account. He then wasn't hurt by that temporary ban because he simply circumvented it. He then basically got a permanent ban for circumventing it (though, again, technically that ban was for the original offense). Of course, that ban didn't hurt him either because he just circumvented that one.

I don't see how you can feel much sympathy given the whole story.


I have no idea about the stars situation. I do know that Stars security has set the precedent of being overly harsh with penalties when they suspect that somebody did something else as well but they can't prove it. Given OP's history and the fact that Stars is known to be really lax with the whole "I had to take a **** so I let my buddy play", my guess is that taht's what happened. However, 0% chance we'll ever find out for sure, and I agree that OP's official story makes Stars look bad.


I'm personally pretty glad that they do this "rule jumping" stuff. It sucks for the one guy who ends up being the whipping boy, but it's a really really effective way of fixing their previous massive mistake of allowing **** to happen that they clearly shouldn't. Plus, the whipping boys typically turn out alright unless he ends up being a scummy repeat offender like OP or JJ.

Edit: Can't sleep and posting on 2p2 = really terrible wording and run-on sentences and crap. sorry about that.

after reading this thread, ive concluded theres about a 100% chance jj is still playing.
people who know his sns are guilty by association as well.

I find it absolutely ridiculous that you think just because you took over an account in 2007 it makes it more acceptable. It is unfathomable to believe that when you took over Chris Vaughn's account it didn't even cross your mind that you were cheating! Imagine the situation! It doesn't matter what ****ing year it is, you're sat deep in a live tournament and the solid guy on your left has just been taken over by Phil Ivey... You'd be ****ing livid!! No doubt you'd justify it by saying they'd never know yet you wouldn't realise how absurdly deceitful and scummy this is.

I mean for **** sake

there's about a million things wrong with this quote alone and you care not to apologise once. In fact it's almost as if you defend the actions by stating that you didn't multi account. WELL GOOD FOR ****ING YOU. ALL YOU DID WAS PLAY ON 5 SEPERATE ACCOUNTS WHILE BANNED AND LIED ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T ACCEPT YOUR ORIGINAL BAN FOR ATTEMPTING TO CHEAT A LOAD OF PEOPLE OUT OF A LOT OF MONEY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

As for this most recent incident. It's hard to find that you wouldn't have some details of the blackmailer. When people are posting MSN logs from 2 years ago they must have got out somehow. And if you're saying that the conversations were spread across multiple people then it must have come from your computer directly. You must have some inkling as to who did spent all this time putting this conversation together because they must really hate you. If they wanted to extort you, they probably would have waited longer having spent so long fabricating a conversation.

Way out of line dude.

Nice post Sorel. Fwiw, back when 2 v good, respected players tried to buy my acct deep in Sunday million, from what I can remember, NO ONE told me that this was an unethical practice. I strongly considered doing it and only didn't because I was a degen and wanted to bink. I had 0 clue that I could potentially have been in Sorel's shoes... In fact, there was a lot of ppl who advised me to take the deal and all of these people are highly respected and doubt anyone would believe these specific ppl told me to.

this was allowed and condoned prior to sorel, i actually think when it happened he wouldnt have gotten in trouble on stars but would have on ftp? i dont remember for sure, it was a long time ago and i didnt follow it through, maybe someone else remembers this better, but if thats the case then it would be pretty easy for sorel to not know that and get in trouble by accident.

all im saying is if he didnt know and it was allowed very recently beforehand, getting banned and losing all of his investment was a steep price to pay

well its easy to look at it from an after perspective and say he doesnt deserve sympathy. i dont have any sympathy for him really given what he did after he was banned, but i also know sorel pretty well and i can look at it from his perspective. lets put it in a sort of timeline

-he does really well early 07 and has money
-gets screwed in live games from mid 07 through early 08, losing prob around 500k dollars and most of his bankroll
-he was staked by us online/live and didnt have a ton of money to his name
-he spent a lot of it buying an account when he thought that was legal, ended up losing both his investment and his winnings and getting banned from the site
-we stopped staking him online on pokerstars as well because we didnt want something similar to happen and wonder if our money would be gone
-hes at a low point in his career after being at a high a few months earlier and is kinda painted into a corner

now all that said, i dont condone in any way him playing on all sorts of diff accounts on ftp afterwards. it was cheating no other way to say it. we still backed him live, he could have just played live and on stars and worked his way out of his makeup and debts to the german guy, but he decided to cheat instead, thats terrible

i definitely wouldnt do it myself, but i understand why he did. he was angry, hes an emotional person who has his own view of the world and since he doesnt think he deserved to be banned he took the rules into his own hands. those of you saying sorel is delusional are kinda right, he does live in his own little world sometimes and didnt care that he was doing one of the worst things you can in online poker because form his perspective im sure he was just thinking "they ****ed me over, **** them".

again, nothing to be condoned, but its an understandable situation that i think a non trivial percentage of poker players would have gone down the same path if they were placed in it by some chance. if the multiaccounting stuff were true, then that nontrivial percent decreases by a lot and its really bad. i would like to see some original convos if possible

yea it has benefits, but would be much better if they emailed everyone when these changes got made. we all get the emails when they are running some promotion for wsop or steps or whatever makes them money, why dont we get them when they make a rule change that could affect our standing on their site?

I've suggeste the exact same thing to the sites many times. The problem is that these aren't actually rule changes. They're just changes in which rules they decide to enforce. They won't send out an e-mail saying "hey, we're going to start enforcing this rule now, fyi" because that would be acknowledging that rules were being broken before and they were letting it slide.

Obv that sucks, but there's 0% chance that that changes so doesn't seem worth discussing.

I take exception to this. Forget about whether it was explicitly mentioned in FTP/Stars rules or not - does no one think this is quite obviously a moral cluster**** if you go ahead with this, 2007 or 2010? It's just straight up cheating surely!!

All im saying is the lines were blurred backthen and probably still are. It's much easier to jump on someone's back w the rest of the community than to look at it from the other persons perspective.

i already said i was, but some uninformed rando with 37 posts and no real knowledge of internet poker isnt out of line when he implies live poker is devoid of all scandal and cheating and online is exactly the opposite?

id rather his feelings be hurt than him go around saying to all his friends how bad online poker is because some guy played on 6 accounts after he was banned. how about inform yourself about bad things that go on live and online and try and prevent them instead of just boycotting one area for another that has equally shady things going on.

This thread is a case study in people "admitting that they were wrong" and then trying to justify their actions/statements.

wp

My point isn't that the punishment was fair given the context. My point is that if a reasonably moral person had received this punishment, it would've made him think back and reflect "Oh wow. I can't believe I stole large amounts of money from innocent people and didn't realize how terrible that was. I feel really bad about that."

And, again, I don't think FTP would've kept Sorel banned if he'd behaved himself afterwards. IIRC ZJ got a lifetime banning from one of Stars/FTP (edit: Apparently it was Stars) and now can play on both of them. So, while technically Sorel's permanent ban is for the account buying (which IMHO is way way worse than what ZJ did anyway), he's really only permabanned because he made a bunch of new accounts afterwards.

Plus, it's pretty hard to say that the punishment was too harsh when he was able to completely circumvent it. In effect, the "punishment" ended up being that he got to change his screen name twice a year or so. That, and they took away the money that he won through cheating.

My buddy Pauly is a really nice guy. He would have my back in any instance growing up. I love the kid. One of my best friends....

He is doing ten years in Walpole State Prison right now because he robbed a friggin hardware store for 80 dollars at 2:30 in the afternoon right near a god damn high school.

I never had a problem with him though. He never stole from me. He just liked his crack. Doesn't make him a bad guy amirite?

it's absurd to make excuses for him though, Daut. Yeah it sucks that he got cheated out of money in cash games, but that's not an excuse to go out and buy some1's account/ cheat or whatever. It's just greed. It's not desperation, or jusifiable blah blah blah. What would happen if he didn't win a couple hundred k? Are you going to be out on the street starving? Nope, you're just not going to be quite as rich as you want to be. When it comes to money many "nice people" will do not so nice things. I'm obiously not some pillar of ethics, but I've never shared hole cards at a final table or bought some1 elses account.

And the Omar comparison sucks. Omar was a murderer.

Back when I was young the poker community handled these issues on their own, perhaps the popularity has taken this "self governance" out of the game. I live in a country that is a **** hole compared to the rest of Europe but still know about some players being banned from every club there is. People having to pay up some serious cash if they didn't want to ride the ******-mobile the next year or so.

Shady stuff happen where ever money is, this is a fact but it does not give some guy the right to do so and then ask for some repentance from the community. If he is forgiven would it be ok for a pro to put 20 horses in the Sunday million, and change accounts with whomever is left at the money? Then jumping to another horse that is still left if he go bust on this guy until he either win or all horses has gone bust?

The money involved in these scams would in most of the western world be considered a felony if it ever went to court. The guys who just get their money taken away and "banned" should consider themselves lucky the sites don't hand these issues over to the police. In the example given in the first post we are talking about $200k! This would be close to 5 years at minimum if he would have made a fraud like this in the real world. Now he got a lifetime ban which he circumvented!

In my opinion the poker community is to forgiving and relaxed when it come to these kind of issues. I don't think most understand how much money a cheater will take from them. The saying seem to be that "only the bad player cheat so it doesn't matter anyway". This is an example of a good player cheating and there are more. The community would not be as relaxed and mellow toward these issues if someone jacked on the street, broke into their homes, etc but when it comes to the tables it stays at some strange ranting and moral discussion. A few led pipes would solve most this problem much faster then any technical solution the site develop.

Op don’t know what it means to come out clean.

First, you don’t come out clean by excuse your own crimes by naming other criminals or other criminal cases.

Instead you should apologise and show that you really mean it.

That is: sacrifice and set up “Sorrel Mizzi’s million dollar fund for the victims of online poker frauds”.

Then you come out clean.

http://www.pocketfives.com/f13/yogib...rn-ftp-450217/