As far along as the poker world has come, it still has its demons. Two regular faces are notably absent from a long-running popular tournament, and PokerStars is once again experiencing technical difficulties during events.
A few days ago, as the Poker Masters was getting started, Daniel Negreanu noticed that Ali Imsirovic and Jake Schindler were absent. It was a little surprising, given that both have been regular fixtures at big-ticket tournaments.
DNegs forecast on Twitter that the two players wouldn’t arrive, and he was right. Poker Masters organizer PokerGO later confirmed that it had suspended these two grinders over allegations of cheating.
No Room For Cheaters
In a press release, the PokerGo Tour (PGT) noted, “The PokerGO Tour (PGT) today announced the indefinite suspensions of Ali Imsirovic and Jake Schindler, effective immediately. The suspensions will extend through at least the 2022 PGT season, at which point a review will take place.”
Imsirovic and Schindler are causing an uproar in the poker community. Multiple players have accused the pair of colluding in live poker tournaments and using real-time assistance (RTA) tools in online tourneys to game the system.
Neither has publicly addressed the allegations, adding to the suspicion that they’re guilty. After Schindler won his WSOP bracelet last summer, he refused to discuss the subject when the media approached him for comments.
Both players are among the best tournament grinders in the world. Before the cheating accusations, Negreanu had dubbed Schindler one of the best players of today.
The two have combined earnings of about $53 million in live tournaments, according to the Hendon Mob. However, if they cheated to get there, their statuses as elite players disintegrate.
What’s more, last year Imsirovic, one of the favorites to top this year’s PGT leaderboard, won 14 major tournaments. With that, he also earned the GPI and PokerGO Tour Player of the Year awards.
For now, the suspensions will run through the end of the year. It isn’t clear if PokerGO will take it any further than that, but it’s possible. This is the first major poker circuit to take action against them, and there could be others.
The poker ecosystem is taking a zero-tolerance approach to cheating, driven by the new GGPoker-led Poker Integrity Council. It hopes to bring transparency and honor to poker and wants to see the entire poker community back an industry-wide blacklist for violators that would cover both live and online events.
PokerStars Suffers Attack
Sunday was the big day of PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). Among the 25 tournaments on the calendar were six Main Events, along with a number of other events.
Anticipation was high as players dreamed of the cash they could win. However, at around 8:30 PM, Flutter-owned PokerStars announced on Twitter that things weren’t working out. It had been forced to pause all tournaments on the .com client due to technical issues.
After an hour with the tournaments paused, PokerStars announced that they were still working to resolve the technical problem. Then, almost two hours later, the platform announced the cancellation of all tournaments. It added that the prize pools would be distributed according to their cancellation policy.
We are extremely sorry but we have had to cancel all tournaments currently running, with prizes awarded in accordance with our tournament cancellation policy (this will be done inline with our policy, which you can find here https://t.co/F3ZZKPUZbh). (1/2)
— PokerStars (@PokerStars) September 25, 2022
PokerStars had become a target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Someone, or some group, deliberately set out to sabotage the day’s events, leaving the poker platform with egg on its face and thousands of players more than a little frustrated.
DDoS attacks are relatively common occurrences – in the second quarter, there were 78,558 attacks globally, according to Kaspersky. There are plenty of tools and sites available that make launching one simple.
However, one would think a gaming giant like Flutter would have tools in place to better counter a DDoS attack. While PokerStars indicated that there was no breach and it didn’t lose customer data, it’s still a huge embarrassment.
The WCOOP Main Events that should have taken place on Sunday are back on the calendar. Players can try their hand again on November 6, provided PokerStars doesn’t run into any more issues.
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