High Stakes Cheating Against WCGRider

High stakes poker professional Douglas ‘WCGRider’ Polk got cheated by using a program installed on his computer. He lost $35,000 before PokerStars concluded its investigation and reimbursed the pro.

Douglas ‘WCGRider’ Polk told the community at 2+2 about his brush with human greed and unscrupulousness in a forum post. On 25 March, he was playing from Tokyo against Isaac ‘luwtheWNBA’ Haxton, among others, when an unknown fish joined him on a $5/$10 NLHE HU table. According to SharkScope, ‘forbidden536’ would normally play $5 Sit and Gos and he had $650 to his name when sitting in. After making it $3,800, he challenged Polk in the chat to play $25/$50 with him and ‘WCGRider’ obliged, unaware that his opponent saw his cards.

’Forbidden536’ ended up winning $34,827 from the high stakes pro, who began to be suspicious after several hands like the one below:

Following the session, Polk formatted and re-installed his computer, after which the player no longer played against him. He notified PokerStars and, while the room initially claimed that they had been unable to find any signs of cheating, several months later they did reimburse him for the losses. The $34,397, found on forbidden536’s account, was transferred to him.

Polk suspects it was Joshua Tyler behind the foul play, who was introduced to him by Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates, who has been known to be affiliated with some shady business. Tyler showed up in Polk’s Los Angeles apartment several times throughout January 2013 and he used Polk’s computer on multiple occasions.

The pro’s accusations are apparently confirmed by the fact that Polk’s roommates have also encountered suspicious sessions, not to mention that Tyler currently resides in the United Kingdom and the cheater account’s IP is also from the country. Polk also mentioned that Tyler worked at an internet company, potentially qualifying him as an adept computer user. To be fair, ‘WCGRider’ concludes with the remark that he is by no means sure of Tyler being guilty, but he is his number one suspect.

‘WCGRider’ has about $360,000 in winnings this year at PokerStars, while losing $290,000 at Full Tilt Poker.