A recent video has surfaced from Poker News.com that clearly shows a member of the poker media giving hand signals to player Ali Tekintamgac indicating the hole cards of his opponent. You can view the video here
After reviewing the video the Tournament Director promptly disqualified Ali and removed his chips from play from the Partouche Poker Tour event. However, this singular story has sparked quite the debate about cheating in the poker world (again). Cheating is nothing new to the poker world with many recent cases highlighting some very serious cheating taking place at many of the top online poker sites. Players having access to their opponents hole cards as well as outright collusion has made headlines dozens of times over the past few years. One need not look further than the UB/AP scandal to see what can happen when these sorts of allegations prove true.
This story is somewhat unique in that it involves a major live poker touring circuit. If you’ve seen the video the reporter is clearly giving signals to Ali and it can only be assumed that during the course of the event this cheating helped him to accumulate a major chip stack. So the question is : Should reporters be given access to walk the tournament floor freely during an event? In my opinion, Yes. Nothing should change because of the actions of one or two people. Should credentials be more difficult to obtain for these events? Yes, I feel that they should. This may help weed out some of the folks that may be predisposed to accept a payout to help a player cheat.
Overall, I feel that the high journalistic values that most reporters follow will prevail and while this story in itself is disturbing will not place a shadow over the live poker tournament world. In fact, I’m willing to bet that this story loses it’s momentum much more quickly than the AB/UP cheating story (which lasted for months). Stay tuned though because we’ll be quick to report on any updates to this story.
Related posts:
