Yorky Pud

Ever since the full details of the Jose Macedo scamming scandal came to light the online poker community has been asking questions of the management of Lock Poker site, the site that took the decision to sponsor and then fire the “Portuguese Poker Prodigy.”

Like many online poker sites that have faced scandals in the past, such as Ultimate Bet and the now defunct Full Tilt Poker, the management team had remained completely silent at a time when the poker playing public deserved answers. Amongst the questions the community wants answers for include how did a player, now known to be Haseeb Qureshi, manage to not only deposit at least $100,000 into a newly formed account despite being from the USA where depsoiting is extremely difficult and how did Lock Poker security not see the $100,000 being chip dumped to Macedo in order for the latter to win a challenge run by Lock Poker.

Whilst the management team of Lock Poker is still to comment on these points they did make an official statement on the Two Plus Two forums through Cardroom Manager and professional poker player Eric “Rizen” Lynch. The statement in full reads, “Lock is currently pursuing legal action against Jose so we are unable to make a substantial comment at this time. We do realize that ongoing silence can lead to people jumping to conclusions. What happened goes against the very core of our player based philosophy and we intend on exercising our legal rights in the most severe degree. We will keep you updated as things progress.”

The initial reaction to this statement has not been met positively at all, with the very first reply in the thread coming from a member called Todd Terry, a well-respected member of the Two Plus Two (more than 15k posts) and the poker community as a whole. Todd Terry is part of a group of poker players currently in the process of suing Full Tilt Poker and he had this to say about Rizen's Lock Poker statement,”IMO, that is a complete crock of ****. The "legal action" (can we have details of where it's been filed or is it just being contemplated at this point?) is purely being used as cover for Lock not to comment. There's no way in hell Lock will pursue a lawsuit and risk having to answer questions under oath about its role in this matter. And what is the purpose of the lawsuit, to recover a few thousand dollars that Lock paid to Girah for an endorsement deal?”

Later in the same thread Rizen reacted to Todd Terry by posting the following, “It's being filed in the near future, once it is the details of what exactly the purpose is will become clearer. There is still some due diligence that must be done first, but I advised it would be better to comment as best we could for now rather than stay silent.

I was VERY clear with Lock before we released this statement that it was a bad idea unless we were actually committed to pursuing legal action, otherwise it would just look like an attempt to avoid commenting.

I cannot control how the community decides to react to things, and given the nature and history of online poker over the last 4-5 years I certainly don't blame people for taking anything that goes on with a heavy dose of cynicism.

If a reasonable amount of time goes by and there are no updates and no filings then I fully expect the community to call us out on it. I think if history has taught us anything about the 2+2 community, it's that hoping they forget about things or let them go is a bad strategy”

Whether or not legal action will actually happen remains to be seen but if it does it will be very interesting to see what sort of precedent it sets for the online poker world. In the past the likes of Josh “jjprodigy” Fields and Justin “ZeeJusting” Bonomo have gotten off lightly for their crimes against the terms and conditions of online poker sites (agreed they lost their funds and damaged their reputation) but if Lock Poker do manage to successfully sue Macedo / Girah then it could open the door for other sites to follow suit or at least act as a major deterrent to the scummy under belly of this fantastic game.