Three players allege Issac Tucker scammed them

UPDATE 8/12/18:

iNinjaPoker has restarted under completely new ownership, and Isaac Tucker is no longer involved. The new owners have also made whole everyone who was previously affected by Tucker's issues.

While still operating under the same name as before, the current incarnation of iNinja seems trustworthy, and all of the current owners have good reputations.

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(November 2016 post is below)


Here is the story. WARNING: This is a LONG read ---> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...Ic/mobilebasic

Cliffs:

- iNinja Poker Leagues was founded by Issac Tucker (@IssacTucker on Twitter) in 2014. It primarily operated out of Minnesota. They signed a bunch of pros, though none of them were very well known. The pros were promised partial WSOP buyins, other tournament buyins, etc, in exchange for being associated with the brand. Here's a puff piece written by Pokernews (likely paid) about iNinja in May 2015: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2015/...wsop-21376.htm

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/cx...mK2KqkHvL=s650

- Issac seems to be having a hard time paying its pros as promised, and gives lots of sketchy excuses. This goes on throughout 2015, though most people eventually get paid, albeit after a lot of hassle and often very late.

- Some people who won WSOP seats at league events did not get their seats, or they flew to Vegas to claim them not knowing whether they would actually receive them or not.

- Pro Kou Vang was about to leave iNinja, but was talked into staying. As a condition of him staying, he was promoted to general manager in February 2016.

- Kou Vang did a good job, and the league ran smoothly for the next 4 months.

- In June 2016, Issac started asking pros to exchange cash for Paypal, at an event at Planet Hollywood. Players found this odd, but they found it even odder when the same requests came in at other iNinja events around the country.

- In July 2016, team pro payments stopped:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/xh...mD9CWv7Be=s650


- He then claims he is being "audited" (by the IRS?) and his money is frozen:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Ol...-23k9Ij69=s650


- Issac holds a heads-up tournament and is suddenly able to pay the pros the money he owes. They suspect he is using tournament funds (which have not yet been distributed) to pay the pros. Issac denies this.

- Issac is arrested for an unrelated matter: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...-park-1625825/ ... This sends pros into a panic that they will never see that heads-up tournament money. (Turned out the arrest was just over traffic tickets.)

- Issac indeed claims that the St. Paul police are denying him access to the money, because it's locked up in a storage locker in St. Paul, and the key was lost while he was in jail.

- Issac supposedly was able to get to the money, but when he showed it to the team, it was clearly new $100 bills, and not the mishmash of $20s, $50, and $100s in that storage locker.

- Kou was talked into buying 50% of the company in April for $40k, in exchange for 50% of the ongoing revenue. He did not receive this revenue.

- Desperate for money, Issac started selling off portions of the company again:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/2K...5SwggL61K=s650


Anyway, I guess the story isn't finished yet, but Kou tweeted out the link to this expose today.

You should stay away from the iNinja Poker League at this point.

This has "Poker Battle" rolling written all over it

iNinja is donkdown.

Big shocker, huh?

http://www.flushdraw.net/news/ininja...turing-effort/

Hi folks,

Chris Wallace from iNinja Poker here. Dan invited me to write up something about the relaunch of iNinja poker to be posted here on the site. We appreciate the opportunity to clear up a few things and get the word out about the changes within the company.

iNinja was the brainchild of Issac Tucker. He was the sole creator and owner of the tour. While he was hardworking and had a great mind for marketing, he had never run a business before and made a number of mistakes that snowballed into a huge mess for him and the company. Issac helped us with things like referring us to all of his old graphics people, offering some advice on how to book venues, and some general marketing ideas, but he is no longer associated with the company.

The iNinja brand is now controlled exclusively by Next Level Poker LLC, a company that I formed myself with Brian Soja and Jordan Handrich. All three of us have spotless reputations in the poker world. We don't believe that we could resurrect a brand with a tarnished reputation if anyone associated with the new company had even a small blemish on their integrity.

We already had a tour company, but had trouble getting venues interested in a tour that had no track record. When Issac offered up iNinja we thought that it might be the solution to that problem. Because iNinja brought in big fields, and never missed a guarantee, venues have been much more interested in talking to us. Once the Google search results get better, we expect to be able to book enough venues to make this company fly. So far the reception has been good, with a lot less haters and trolls than we expected.

We have an integrity page on our site (ininjapoker.com) that outlines what we think every tour should do, including never holding player money, never playing our own events, never buying people into our events or offering discounted buy-ins, and never taking anything from prize pools for extras like trophies and prize packages. I've personally been burned by this myself and want to make sure that it never happens at any of our tour stops.

I'm very open to suggestions from members of this community about what a tour should do to maintain an environment of integrity that players can trust. We know this trust will develop over time as people see who we are, but we would like to start off with all the right things in place to make that happen quickly.

We know the brand had serious problems in the past, but we really want to make this thing work and create a tour that caters to players in a fair and honest way. Thank you for reading.

I'm completely open to questions and you can contact me at fox@ininjapoker.com

Thanks for the statement, Chris.

I will say that, from everything I've seen, I would personally feel comfortable playing an iNinja event at this point.