On Tuesday, October 14th, “RealOA” won the GGMillion$ online $10,000 and “Buzzcut” came in third place. On October 18th, Buzzcut posted evidence that after “RealOA” won the tournament, he thanked Ren Lin for helping him out at the final table, in a semi-private group chat that Buzzcut was also a member of. Buzzcut posted RealOA thanking Ren and other evidence from group chats on Notion, and that post has been taken down, but the evidence was pretty clear-cut. It was clear-cut enough that within one day, Ren Lin apologized on Twitter, ensured that RealOA returned all the funds and covered the funds RealOA could not pay back1 and everyone in the tournament was made whole. On October 21th, GG released an official statement where they outlined what happened and shared their punishments for all involved:
RealOA: Permanently banned from GGPoker, WSOP, and all partner platforms.
Ren “Tony” Lin: Indefinitely suspended from GGPoker, WSOP, and all partner platforms.
Restitution: GGPoker reclaimed all the funds remaining in RealOA’s account, $250,523. While $96,380 short, Lin voluntarily contributed the remaining amount from personal funds to cover the shortfall. Lin’s contribution was made from his own money and was not related to any staking or compensation from the final table. It was his personal commitment to restoring fair play.
I am going to do a deep dive into Ren and GG’s statements and why they are lacking, but before I do, I would like to give my perspective on this case. Ren, like Nacho Barbero who had his own cheating scandal, is a goofball. They are also poker players of questionable skill who may or may not be winning in everything they play. The cheating they engaged in— having GTO Wizard open while playing online, but not actively RTAing every hand in Nacho’s case, and helping someone with a close decision at a FT in a one-off situation— is not superuser or collusion style cheating. If I had to guess how much EV they stole in these situations, I would say under five figures combined, but what matters here is not how much money was taken, but that game integrity is preserved.
Intent matters, but not as much as your actual actions. Let’s say I am playing soccer. Someone goes in for a breakaway, I try to slide tackle aiming for the ball, I miss, hit the attacking player in the ankle, break their ankle and take them down in the box. While they are getting stretchered off the field and I am given a red card and watch the opposition take a PK, do you think if I were to say “I know I broke his ankle, but I was going for the ball. I am a nice guy and people know I don’t want to hurt someone,” that people would think that absolves me from punishment?
One’s actions mattering more than their intent is especially true for sponsored pros. Part of the reason poker sites pay pros to be ambassadors is because the gambling world is full of unsavory characters, and some pros have reputations as people with integrity. When they take money to endorse a poker site, they are implicitly saying to the customers of the site, “Your money is safe and the games are fair here.”
The number one existential threat facing online poker is that the games aren’t fair, and the second biggest threat is that people stop playing because they believe the games aren’t fair even if they are. Online poker being “rigged” was one of the oldest jokes in the early days of online poker. In the past three years, GG had two scandals where people have found embarrassingly large loopholes in their security (1 2).
If people don’t trust your software is fair, that’s a big problem, but not far behind are concerns of botting/RTA and concerns around ghosting and team play. Those are prevalent and very hard to stop. I could play online poker on my desktop and have GTO Wizard or a private solver open on my laptop. The most effective cheaters would want TeamViewer or some sort of remote desktop app to ghost someone, but one could also just call someone on the phone “I have eights here, what do I do?”, which is what Ren did.
If game integrity is of paramount importance to operators, when people are caught flagrantly violating the rules, even if they meant well or it was an accident, they should be punished and punished harshly.
During the GG super user scandal. GG Ambassador Daniel Negreanu was tweeting about Dave Chappelle’s standup special, whether “Jihadomo” is an appropriate nickname, and other culture war bullshit. When people asked him about the cheating scandal on the site that is paying him gobs of money, he replied that he had no comment it’s and issue best handled by security department. As I said above, there are many roles an ambassador for a poker site plays, and one of them is to ensure the player’s money is safe and the games are fairly run. In this case, Daniel was doing one of his jobs by tweeting irreverently, but failing at another part of his job, ensuring people that the site that pays him is safe to play poker on. I bring up this anecdote not to roast Daniel, but because I tweeted about it at the time and want to show my own consistency on the matter. If I think you should not tweet about bullshit when your site’s game integrity is in question, I certainly do not think if you are A SPONSORED PRO of a poker site, that “well I am just a goofball” or ”everyone knows I have the utmost integrity” is a reasonable defense for getting caught red-handed cheating, no matter how mild that cheating is.
If a casual poker-playing friend of mine came up to me and said “I don’t play on GG; they have sponsored pros team playing with their friends at big final tables and they don’t get punished,” what response would a GG defender have?
So let’s get into the nitty gritty of their statements, which I will go through Fire Joe Morgan style. I am not going to mince words below and it will be harsh, but I want to be clear, I don’t think these actions represent the totality of Ren’s character, but I also don’t think that matters. Just as someone can break ankles while slide tackling and donate to charity, what matters is creating rules to uphold game integrity and enforcing them fairly.
I must state unequivocally that I gained no form of profit from this incident. I held no stake in any player’s entry, received no payment, and derived no benefit whatsoever. My actions were purely an instinctive reaction in an inappropriate setting—one that contradicted the principles of fair competition I have always strived to uphold.
You helped someone cheat. It does not matter if you received financial compensation.
On the day of the incident, I was competing in a WSOP event in Cyprus. During a ten-minute break, I clicked a Tencent Meeting link shared by RealOA. Upon joining, I saw he was playing the GG10300 Final Table. When he asked for my opinion on a hand, I responded instinctively, offering my personal advice simply out of a desire to help a friend. The entire interaction lasted only a few minutes, after which I left the call and returned to my live tournament. As it was my first time entering such a live session, I failed to recognize it as a rule violation at that moment, mistakenly equating it with post-tournament hand discussions common in our chat groups.
How are you a sponsored pro of a poker site who does not realize that you cannot give someone advice while they are playing a hand at a big final table?
Later, I learned in our poker group that RealOA had won the event. He sent a $100 red packet in our 500-member group, tagged me, and thanked me for the advice. I did not accept the red packet. It was only when another player, Yl3i, posted about his third-place finish that I realized Buzzcut was his in-game ID, and I congratulated him accordingly.
It does not matter that you did not accept the money. Helping a friend is still something in your best interests, and you violated the rules of the site that pays you money to do it.
Having experienced many difficult periods in my own life, I understand deeply what it means to struggle. That is why, when I see friends in need, I often feel an unconscious urge to assist. It was this very mindset—”having been rained on, I always want to hold an umbrella for others”—that led me to commit this serious error and cross a clear competitive boundary.
Although my intentions were not self-serving, a mistake was made, and I take full responsibility.
Helping a friend is self-serving. You are choosing preferential treatment for someone you know over a stranger. Just because it does not financially benefit you does not make it not self-serving.
Following communication with the relevant parties, RealOA has returned the majority of the prize money last night, and I will cover the remaining portion. The total amount has been submitted to the platform for fair distribution.
I will close with this because this moves into GG’s statement. RealOA should not “return the money,” GG should confiscate it. Ren should not “cover the remaining portion”; this implies that if Ren did not want to cover the remaining portion, then the players in the tournament would not be made whole, which is a ridiculous standard. People who cheat should not be negotiating terms like they’re paying back a debt.
Onto the GG statement. Let’s start with this:
I write 10,000 words a week and I rarely have a typo like “Cypruss.” [You’re welcome! -ed.] Maybe put some effort into your game security statement.
Restitution: GGPoker reclaimed all the funds remaining in RealOA’s account, $250,523. While $96,380 short, Lin voluntarily contributed the remaining amount from personal funds to cover the shortfall. Lin’s contribution was made from his own money and was not related to any staking or compensation from the final table. It was his personal commitment to restoring fair play.
The game security department frames this the same way as Ren. Boy, isn’t he generous for making everyone whole? No mention of where the money went. No mention of what would happen without Ren’s beneficence. A statement that clarifies he gained nothing financially, even though he was still an interested party in the results of the final table. A final statement about how Ren’s committed to fair play, outside of the part where he blatantly broke the one rule everyone who has played online poker knows. Also even if Ren giving real time advice to players is rare, it seems likely he was regularly turning a blind eye to other ghosting that occured in this server.
This case demonstrates three principles:
We will prevent and detect violations. Our monitoring system and hand analysis identify suspicious activity.
Consequences are immediate. Any result from the GGPoker investigation will extend across GGPoker, WSOP, and all partner platforms worldwide.
Players are protected. When integrity is compromised, we ensure that financial restitution is made to those affected.
GG did not detect shit. The cheater cheated in a shared channel with the third place finisher. They did nothing to identify suspicious activity.
Yes, the consequences were immediate.
The players were not protected in this case, because it required an act of charity from one of the violators.
Real-time assistance through private communication channels remains challenging to prevent, but GGPoker’s detection and investigation capabilities will continuously improve. Competitive poker depends on trust and equal conditions. We will not allow anyone to undermine that foundation.
Do you know who undermined the foundation of trust and equal playing conditions? Your own security department. Your lead pro defending your other pro publicly. The foundation is rotten to the core and your stewardship of the site is why.
As you can tell, I am quite fired up by this scandal, but not in the way you might expect. I don’t think what Ren did was all that bad; I think the punishments were more or less fair, depending on when Ren’s “indefinite” suspension ends. Some infractions warrant lifetime bans, some warrant lighter punishments. What bothers me about this is that all the public communication from Ren, Daniel, and GG directly or implicitly advances a principle I disagree with. Since Ren is a “good guy” and a sponsored pro, he should get some leeway. It is the exact opposite. Sponsored pros should be paragons of upholding game integrity … that’s what the money is for! Bending over backwards to defend a guy on their payroll instead of enforcing the rules shows the game security team does not care about game security.
In June, I wrote about Martin Kabhrel and Will Kassouf and wrote “Poker is both a competition and a customer service business”2 I wrote this when talking about how winning players might need to let losing players get away with some behaviour. If a VIP in a cash game wants to string raise, you better believe I am letting him say “I call your bet and raise.” This is an unfortunate but necessary part of doing business and it can lead to grey areas. However, someone sponsored by your site helping another player cheat at a high-stakes final table is not a grey area. It’s as black and white as you get, and if your site has an image problem where people don’t trust that the games are fair, letting a sponsored pro who is caught red-handed get away with a light punishment does nothing to fix the problems with your site or the public perception of it. GG is literally in the customer service business, and they are choosing to undermine competitive integrity to protect their employees instead of their customers.
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A PIO sim that forces me to play some checks on the flop for POTD #151
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POTD #154 onemorething
In this hand the AJ combos that continue on the turn are AhJx. This occurs because the BU bets the Ad and the Ac more than the Ah on the turn. In some sims this would happen because the BU bets the flop so polar that they’d often check the flop with a backdoor, but that is not the case here, every AhXh hand bets more than their equivalent suited hand in clubs or diamonds. What is happening here is that AK and AJ check the flop more often when they have a backdoor flush draw and bet more without one; this occurs because AK and AJ without a backdoor can comfortably bet-fold the flop. So the button barrels clubs and diamonds more on the turn because they want me to have hearts, which means I call a little more often with hearts because he’s bluffing more.
This is an interesting puzzle to solve, but does it matter? No. Not really. If you know your opponent is playing a perfect strategy and know his and your strategy with backdoors and can correctly suss out the value of your bluff catching cards, you can use that information. But it requires such precision and high level thinking that it is very unlikely your opponent is playing that way. To use an example, in this hand I thought that the BU would bet very polar and would mostly check hands like Ah4h, but always barrel hands like Ac4c on the flop and I was wrong. In this hand you would be correct to call down vs me more often when you have the Ah just as the solver does, but it would be because I’d be barrelling clubs and spades too often because I’d have bet the flop with them too often not because I’d barrel them too much on the turn because they unblock hearts.
If you have a really good sense of your opponent’s game you can make these very specific kicker adjustments, if you don’t it’s best to think of overall frequencies. When you are dealing with simpler first order effects like, he usually gives up with flush draws, so I don’t want a flush draw blocker in my hand or I block bottom set, which is a likely value combo. Those are good reasons to make a river call or fold. When you’re dealing with second and third order effects like “I should call this combo on the river, because I am unblocking flopped backdoors on a rainbow board” you are probably wasting your mental energy on a specific technical concept, when you should be focusing on more nuts and bolts factors like “are they bluffing enough?”
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Bluesky
I guess he lost them playing on GG, but it’s not been made clear why there was a short fall.
In July I wrote about the WSOP POY race and quoted myself quoting myself from June “A belief I hold about the poker world that I’ve written about here is that “Poker is both a competition and a customer service business.”". Maybe in Novemeber this ouroborous will continue to grow and I can quote myself, quoting myself, quoting myself.