Wesley, Airball Accuse HCL Foe Mars of Cheating Private Poker Games Out of Millions
https://www.pokernews.com/news/2023/...ames-45012.htm
Wesley, Airball Accuse HCL Foe Mars of Cheating Private Poker Games Out of Millions
https://www.pokernews.com/news/2023/...ames-45012.htm
Too bad there weren’t any warning signs with the guy.
Oh wait
https://twitter.com/rinapoker/status/1731453049615602163
https://twitter.com/brettrichey/status/1731490301276270953
How gullible are 2020s poker players?
Now there's some suspicion upon a few others, perhaps warranted, perhaps not.
"Sia the Bot" from the Max Pain Monday streams is supposedly an ex-girlfriend of Mars, the accused cheater. Sia is seemingly defending Mars in cryptic fashion, and another person on Twitter is stating that Sia was in on the con with him:
https://twitter.com/SargisRuss/status/1731569153621004715
https://twitter.com/R15surfer/status/1731573372704973283
Wesley Fei is very down about his experience in poker:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1731463554547773556
Translation:
Recently, I have been thinking about whether I was right or wrong to enter the poker circle. I have become the top poker player in the world and created the world's largest pot (and the legendary Poison King) and the second largest pot. But recently I discovered that I had been cheated out of millions of dollars online and offline, and I lost interest in this game.
I gambled and cheated nine times out of ten. No matter how good the technology is, what’s the use? As a result, I lost millions of dollars in the poker world, and the B circle also failed in the big bull market of brc20, with an implied loss of several million dollars.
But the process is very happy. I have lived a very comfortable life in the past two years, and I have also achieved a certain degree of success in another field. I don’t know if it’s good or bad.
Nick Vertucci, who often played in the games with Mars, is now accused of signaling him during games, though without any real evidence:
https://twitter.com/PrahladFriedman/status/1731499824258683334
https://twitter.com/PrahladFriedman/status/1731503143446319285
https://twitter.com/PrahladFriedman/status/1731516330736558531
https://twitter.com/PrahladFriedman/status/1731520205833035899
https://twitter.com/PrahladFriedman/status/1731503293631762539
https://twitter.com/NickVertucciNV/status/1731526492893610259
Note that Prahlad has been on an "everyone on streams is cheating" kick for awhile now, and has been acting generally unstable on Twitter for quite some time, even by Prahlad standards. So he's not exactly a credible source.
https://twitter.com/msalsberg/status/1731600942603350285
https://twitter.com/msalsberg/status/1731610437547151674
It's true that a lot of criminals have been associated with HCL in its relatively short run thus far.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean much. Ryan Feldman has a huge network of contacts from the LA high stakes world, and many of these players are unknowns who play in private games. It's inevitable that some of them are going to turn out to be criminals. Degenerate gamblers are frequently not nice or good-hearted people.
In absence of any proof of wrongdoing, there really shouldn't be heat on Nick/Ryan/HCL right now. If there IS proof against them, by all means it should be brought forward. But speculation isn't going to get anyone anywhere here.
The focus should be on Mars, and outing any accomplices he might have had.
this is such a poker thread.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
This doesnt look good for HCL yet again. I mean theres the up in the air issues from that soyboy Adelstein who I dont think was cheated but If theres legit evidence of Mars and even worse one of their regulars Sia the Bot being involved in this cheating ring they cant possibly allow either of them on stream again.
How these pos don't get their teeth knocked in, at best, is beyond me.
Mars responded to the allegations, and it's as dumb and incoherent as you'd expect.
https://www.pokernews.com/news/2023/...ions-45023.htm
Soooo... some Chinese guy named "(Sun)" did it, and admitted it to Mars? And conveniently he's back in China now, and we don't get any further information on him?
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure. Seems legit.
The fact that tons of other people are accusing Mars of cheating in other games is just a coincidence, I'm sure.
It's all (Sun)'s fault.
Wesley's name sure does come up a lot when scams are being discussed.
Almost as frequently as vertucci's these days.
Poker is inherently shady. Why pay more rake and risk more shadiness with a home game?
I understand a couple hundo with college buds, but real money? No way.
All the skimpily dressed dealers and free booze in the world would not convince me otherwise.
Sooo... this has all gotten crazy, and to be honest it's hard to follow, especially because the main players in this whole thing don't speak English as a first language, for the most part.
Wesley going extremely hard on Twitter today. I'll try to break down what he's claiming, but it's all very confusing.
First, on December 5, he responded to Mars' claims in the Pokernews article that he's just broke and bitter:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732145661104271657
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732173509479284738
Not surprisingly, Mars deleted his Twitter, common among scammers when called out. However, before that he went back and forth with Wesley, accusing HIM of previously cheating:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732222559138333058
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732226285428961789
Some guy supposedly came out and defended Wesley, but posted the "proof" in Chinese!
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732251166988251232
After all this passed, Wesley started calling out Mars' alleged accomplices. I'll get into that in the next post...
Wesley claimed that there were accomplices "Mike the Magician" and a guy named "Peter"...
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732367123476099476
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732375431649894825
Then Antoine Saout (3rd place Main Event finisher in '07) pointed out that "Mike" was actually French pro poker player Arnaud Mattern!
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732406968969740718
He then claimed that "Peter" was a guy named Dacia Henderson, and "Bruce" (another accused accomplice) was really Pham Long:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732439852720021841
But the big bombshell was about to drop...
Wesley claimed he had a phone conversation with Mars, where Mars supposedly admitted the cheating, but said he was going back to China. However, he said Mars also claimed that his partners were going to "look for Mafia" to kill Wesley!
Basically, @Marsback2earth called me and admitted everything including he's a cheater and @ArnaudMattern and their cheating syndicate now is very mad. They are gonna leave US today now, and threaten me delete all the tweets about them. Otherwise, they gonna kill me. Mras said he wants to save my life and he's gonna go back to china. Other members are gonna leave US today and find mafia to kill me.
@ArnaudMattern now is dealing Baccarat in @WynnLasVegas so does their cheating group is there. Mars, Dacia Henderson and Dacia Henderson. I and my friend got scammed 3.1 M and now they want to kill me. I’m not scared I will call the police right now. I have all voice recording can prove that. Justice will ultimately prevail over evil. I’m gonna give all evidence to police. #Justicehttps://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732470568807710894
Then he identified Peter as not Dacia Henderson, but rather Shane Hennen, who had at least one violent felony on his record:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732595127431135405
Arnaud Mattern issued a brief statement denying it, and threatening legal consequences for accusing him:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732475904184729751
Wesley then claimed that he is going to expose the cheating ring, even if it gets him killed:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732476559758606835
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732478068240040379
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732479736260215083
He noted that Bruce / Pham Long deleted his Twtter:
https://twitter.com/Kaspanaut/status/1732530900729209086
When asked to post proof of this recorded conversation where he was threatened, Wesley claimed it was all in Mandarin:
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732551237307080903
https://twitter.com/CryptoApprenti1/status/1732554199542780041
So that's where we stand now.
Confused? Me too.
Others have come out claiming that they were cheated by this group, but there is no hard evidence.
For example, take this post by Blank Check Ben:
https://twitter.com/blankcheckben/status/1732202377124409660
https://twitter.com/blankcheckben/status/1732209729319882784
I don't think this hand means all that much. Maaaaaaaybe the cheater could see what was coming, but how? Marks on the sides of cards that were clear enough to where someone wearing special glasses/lenses could see? Kinda far-fetched, but possible.
Hard to give much credit to these "check out this hand history" stories. The real question is if they really did find a deck with clear invisible markings on them, and if it was the deck brought by Mars.
At this point, Mars is acting pretty much like a guilty man, right down to deleting his Twitter. His poor reputation before this most recent scandal isn't helping matters.
It will be interesting if that recorded conversation in Mandarin ever makes it to someone reliable who can translate it and vouch that it's real.
Private poker games declined and had largely been replaced by casino/cardroom games by the 1990s, at least in markets with such cardrooms.
Then bigger games moved private in the 2020s.
Now you see why this was dumb, and why private games declined in the first place.
COVID sped up the process of the games going private. It moved due to greed. People wanted the fish for themselves. This way they could build custom games around the players they wanted there (and shut out the ones they didn’t want).
For awhile this was being accomplished by setting up private games in poker rooms such as Aria, but eventually the middleman was cut out, and the games would simply take place in private homes or hotel rooms.
Now you see the downside to all of this, and why people were happy to get out of private games and into the casino back in the '90s. Did we learn nothing from "Worm" in Rounders?
Mars somewhat admits some fault here, but not fully.....and also threats of violence.
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