Tekin' care of business

May 16, 2011, Posted by Pokerfarm

Controversy has erupted at this week's WPT Championship in Las Vegas. Suspected cheater Ali Tekintamgac has been allowed to play in the WPT flagship event, much to the dismay of the wider poker community. Tekintamgac was famously banned from the Partouche Poker Tour main event in Cannes after video evidence determined that he had used various media personnel to peek at opponents hole cards. There have been several reports of Mr Tekintamgac gaining an unfair advantage over his competitors and a simple Google search points to some fairly damning evidence from the WPT Barcelona - http://tinyurl.com/3myojp8

Tekintamgac - Soul reads

Let's assess our villain's strategy. Effective as it may be, sophisticated it is not. It seems he has a friendly cameraman on his side in this video clip, handily placed to zoom in on his unsuspecting opponent's hole cards. Once our intrepid video blogger catches sight of the hole cards, he's seen here making some kind of hand signal back to Ali Tekkers, who makes a Hollywood hero call with Qc5c, dominating the 8h9d of his opponent and going on to win.

Amazingly the WPT have allowed Ali Tekintamgac to keep his winnings from this tournament as well as honouring his $25k buyin to the WPT Championship, something that didn't sit too well with a certain Daniel Negreanu who spilled all on his Twitter account last night, claiming 'Ali Tekimtamgac who was caught cheating in Partouche is in #WPTChamp - I called him out, and floor told ME I can't do that! When will we learn'.

Negreanu - Pissed

It will be interesting to see how far Ali Tekintamgac goes in the event and what kind of reaction players would have were he to go on and win the thing. Players are already calling for Harrahs to ban him indefinitely from the World Series of Poker; the likelihood of this happening is slim on the grounds that the evidence put against Tekintamgac isn't 100% conclusive. Media access at the WSOP this year is going to be incredibly stringent and members of the press have already been told that they won't be able to stand watching an individual table for more than 5 minutes at a time. This obviously has disastrous implications for live updates, so not only has Tekintamgac brought poker into disrepute, he's also greatly restricted the volume of coverage we fans are used to come WSOP time. If you're sat at a table with Ali Tekintamgac anytime soon, make sure you keep an eye on him. Failing that, take a concrete slab as a card protector.

The Tekintamagic card protector, top seller this year