Last week we could read about the "poker prodigy" José "Girah" Macedo, 18, and how he tricked people into playing poker against "the extremely bad player sauron1989", at the same time he "gave advice" to the players in question on Skype while he got to see their hands.
It didn't take long before people found out that is was in fact José Macedo who used the account and as a consequence of this Macedo lost his sponsorship deal. This was the second time Macedo was involved in a cheating scandal. However, first time he only let another player use his account in order to win a ranking competition.
"I am ashamed of what I have done. I told my mom about it and she's ashamed as well as it's not the way she has raised me" Macedo wrote on a forum after the latest scandal. But Macedo was not the only one involved in this scandal - big names such as Haseeb Qureshi and Daniel "jungleman12" Cates had also used the account!
Haseeb admitted early that he had been playing with one of Macedo's accounts, which also was confirmed by Daniel Cates in an interview a few days ago. In the same interview, Daniel Cates also admitted that he has been using the "Girah" account.
"I have played a few times. I lied about that before" Daniel Cates says in the interview.
Many players have fell victim for this cheating scandal. For example, Tyler Smith, an american poker pro, played against "Girah" when Daniel Cates used the account. According to Smith, Cates admitted this in an SMS conversation and offered him poker lessons as compensation. Smith lost around 40,000 USD to Cates during the sessions, so most probably he will continue fighting for a refund of the money he lost.
