Seals With Clubs (SwC Poker) under fire for allowing racial epithets in player chat

[Dan Druff]

Interesting controversy brewing today regarding Bryan Micon's bitcoin-based Seals Wtih Clubs site (now called SwC Poker, and "supposedly" not owned/run by him anymore).

A poker player named Katie Chandler, who apparently streams SwC sessions on Twitch, became offended after seeing the chat room full of words like "n-word", "idiotic", and "kike". She raised an issue on Twitter, and someone at SwC responded by stating that chat is "uncensored", and therefore such language is allowed.

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215768106989236224

Who is Katie Chandler? I hadn't heard of her before, but she appears to be a lesbian online poker player, and her Twitter is mostly filled with sports picks. I expected her Twitter to also be filled with social justice type tweets, but surprisingly I didn't find any, so perhaps she isn't really into all of that.

Katie then called out to ACR to add mixed games, so she could abandon SwC for good.

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215814229493604353

A Twitter user named "Alee Yah" (@ElleSriracha), has since taken up the cause, and is going hard on SwC. Another user agreed, and called on Joey Ingram to publicize the issue.

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215787374912966661

Alee Yah called out James Urbanic, a SwC regular/affiliate who was mistaken for being a pro there, and they got into a debate:

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215784402111696896

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215785544472379392

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/1215788939828715520

At the moment, it seems SwC is standing firm, and is refusing to censor such language or behavior.

[SPIT this]

And you get a stars ban for saying g-a-y. Sad!

[big dick]

The chat is the only reason I play on swc. Im tjslurk210

[Dan Druff]

And you get a stars ban for saying g-a-y. Sad!

I hope that's not true nowadays.

When I played there up to 2011, when it was more okay to make gay jokes, I was never once warned for typing



after taking a bad beat.



However, I will admit that Stars once had a meeting about me, where they discussed "what to do about Dan Druff typing g-a-y and site=joke". The conclusion was just to ignore it. I was told this story by a site insider. They were more upset by the site=joke part, though.

[zealanddonk]

Micon's always been niggardly.

[TheXFactor]

Surprised that the state of Nevada or U.S. government didn't seize and shutdown http://www.SealswithClubs.com for good and take every last Bitcoin that Micon made connected to that website.

[Dan Druff]

For those interested in the Seals With Clubs history, here is a brief summary:

2010: Some unknown guy starts Seals With Clubs, a bitcoin-only poker site, but it has almost zero traffic and is poorly marketed.

2011: Micon gets involved and agrees to be the face of the site. This, by coincidence, was right when we stopped being friends, but our issues were totally unrelated to Seals.

Feb 2015: Micon gets busted by the state of Nevada for running Seals. They seize a bunch of his stuff, and he flees to Antigua before they can arrest him. He then makes a defiant video where he announces he is starting SwCPoker.eu to replace Seals.

March 2015: After giving a rather narrow timeframe (30 days) to get the bitcoin off of original Seals, the site closes, and the owners keep the unclaimed bitcoin, which was probably a lot. I always felt this was really crappy. Later, Jesse Martin complained he was stiffed out of $4k because he was getting errors cashing out, and everyone had refused to help him. Micon claimed to Jesse that all of this was the doing of the other Seals owners, and he was just a figurehead promoter. I'm not sure what to believe.

May 2015: SwCPoker is announced "sold" to unknown parties supposedly in Europe, and Micon says he's no longer part of it.

June 2015: Micon, via hotshot Vegas attorneys Chesnoff and Schonfeld, gets a sweetheart deal where he pays a $25k fine and gets 2 years probation. He returns to the US to complete the deal, and he is required to live there for the next 2 years and "hold a steady job". He gets a sham job at a drone store through a friend to satisfy that requirement.

Mid-2017: Having successfully completed probation, Micon leaves the US and moves to Antigua.


That's where it stands right now.

SwCPoker has never been very active, but it has chugged along for years with 50-100 cash players on at once, mostly at low/micro limits. It clearly makes money, but I don't know how much.

The site does not require any kind of documentation to sign up and play. You can play completely anonymously, and never tell them who you are. All transactions are in bitcoin.

[ftpjesus]

Surprised that the state of Nevada or U.S. government didn't seize and shutdown http://www.SealswithClubs.com for good and take every last Bitcoin that Micon made connected to that website.

Maybe that’s because it’s run under a .eu domain and has for awhile. US has no jurisdiction over EU domains hence why somebody registering a EU domain if they hypothetically live in the US has to have a domain agent for that domain in order to own/control it. 😏

Sealswithclubs.com isn’t active it is however registered through sometime in 2022 though a proxy privacy agent out of panama in Central America

[badguy23]

And you get a stars ban for saying g-a-y. Sad!

This is totally false Yebsite his Aspergers friend and I have been running wild on Stars and we use way worse language. Fck u Bovada/Ignition u fucking wanna be cunts. U think I forgot about my 12k Ill be getting that back soon enough from you fckers.

SWC is like the old forums.

Fck all the ppl offended

[Dan Druff]

So how do I feel about this?

I see both sides, actually.

PokerFraudAlert is a free speech forum. Like SwC, I do not censor racial epithets in this section of the forum -- something which has led to similar criticism against me in the past.

However, on the other hand, this is a forum and not a poker site. People are on here for one reason and one reason only -- to read and post messages. Poker is a different story. Many people want to play poker peacefully without having to see racial epithets in chat.

Furthermore, I should point out that I do NOT allow racial epithets or trolling in the "serious" parts of this forum. Trolling and nasty language is only allowed in this "Flying Stupidity" and the anonymous "Bathroom Wall" subforums -- the two free speech areas of the site. I disallow it elsewhere because I don't want trolling and racist language to distract people from serious poker/gambling being discussed in the other forum sections. Additionally, I also don't allow such language on my vegascasinotalk.com forum, for the same reason.

So I'm torn here. Much like this is a free speech forum, SwC purports to be a free speech poker site. So I suppose I can't really criticize them too harshly for that.

At the same time, the chat room is only a secondary feature on poker sites. In fact, some sites like Bovada have completely eliminated chat entirely. It's a bit baffling why SwC is letting immature trolls drive away good customers, especially since the site is kind of a ghost town already. They need every player they can get. I doubt they will lose any business if they put a few rules in place against epithets and severe trolling in chat. As much as I love free speech, if I ran a poker site, I wouldn't allow this sort of thing to occur.

I believe this all stems from Micon's longtime libertarian-esque ideological commitment to free speech. This was an area where we initially agreed, but eventually I came to believe that Micon was overly committed to it without also utilizing common sense. This was what eventually held back NWP from growing further during the poker boom. The cool/outlandish free speech environment eventually transformed into a place where trolls would simply post obscene/gross pictures and gratuitous epithets for the sake of being shocking. You couldn't scroll through a single thread without seeing big black dicks in your face. It became a mess. Eventually Micon and I came to be at odds about this, where I wanted a more common sense free speech approach (free speech while disallowing shock pictures & posts meant to disrupt), while Micon more wanted the Wild West.

When I started PFA, I took the former approach, and I think it's worked well.

Anyway, this current controversy really makes me think Micon is still involved, and in fact the SwC tweets read like something he would write. I have no proof of this, but that's my gut feeling. I do know other people are operating SwC on a day-to-day basis behind the scenes. Micon's level of involvement -- or lack thereof -- has never been fully clear, which is by design since his legal trouble in 2015.

[ftpjesus]

Why should anybody be surprised. Come on we all know the original black cock racist and other shit that went on with NWP. And as much as Micon can claim he’s not involved I think we all know the truth off the record even if he’s just a silent partner now it’s no secret those who run SWC now are from the NWP and Donkdown family. Obviously she’s not educated about the background of the site and it’s birth and the folks behind it.