Lock Poker’s cheating scandal involving Jose “Girah” Macedo is one of those that if studied starts to make your head hurt. It’s quite clear to the outside world that cheating has happened. Lock’s attempts to cover this up with a random concoction of statements makes you feel like someone’s trying to take your brain out of your left ear with a spoon. Scratch beneath the surface though and you begin to see that there are inherent lies with the case.
The case has been going on ever since Macedo, a Lock-sponsored pro, won the Bluff Pro Challenge. It was controversial as Haseeb Qureshi handed him $100,000 worth of chips. To those not in the know it’s known as chip dumping, which is also known as cheating. It has meant that Qureshi was dropped by CardRunners and Macedo lost his job at Lock after he had also tried to scam players using his account on the site. The big wigs at Lock Poker seem to be making a series of veiled denials though.
First off, we had CEO Jen Larson making a statement that the actions of Macedo were out of line. Although the rest of it made the point, that you will have heard a lot, that Macedo had enough in money on his IP to win regardless. It fits in with Larson’s demeanor as being dishonest I’m sure you’ll agree.
When the controversy started to fly around this statement, Lock’s Poker Room Manager, Eric “Rizen” Lynch, came to her defence, stating, “To this day this is factually true. […]The statement says nothing about ‘winning enough to win the challenge via legitimate play’ though, just that there was enough money won from his IP to have won the challenge.”
They seem to be losing the point here though. It doesn’t matter how much money there was in the first place. The fact remains that the money was transferred over to Macedo early enough that it would have influenced his play down the line. It’s like paying someone to fix a match and then saying that no one did anything wrong because the bet didn’t come off anyway.
PokerFuse.com also carries quotes it claims are form Macedo’s personal blog, which read:
“I want to reiterate, as some people have doubted me – I have not colluded or chipdumped in any way, and no one played on my account for me and won money toward the challenge. To me such actions are absolutely inexcusable and I would never do such a thing, to win a challenge or anything else. I will stand tall next to the mistakes I have made and own up to them, but nevertheless I will defend what were my legitimate winnings during the course of the Bluff Challenge.”
This disappeared soon after and it leaves us to watch Larson’s nose to get ever longer as the scandal goes on. As long as she has that special mirror of hers she’ll continue to see things through a pair of rose-tinted specs. That’s even before the online poker community presents its evidence that Macedo is poker’s answer to UFOs creating crop circles.
