Macedo to Become Successful in Business?

Former poker prodigy and scandal villain Jose ‘Girah’ Macedo has recently emerged in the news for the first time since 2011. The 21-year-old Portuguese has been engaged in a successful cleaning business in the UK.

Jose ‘Girah’ Macedo had gained fame as a wonder kid of poker before becoming the bad guy in one of the loudest scandal in the history of online poker. The ex-Lock Poker Pro, or the “Portuguese poker prodigy” as many would call him at the time, got caught cheating first in May 2011: he dominated the field in the Lock Poker Challnege and won the event before getting banned for multi-accounting. Another player had been proven to use his account during the challenge.

“Jose is young and he has made a big mistake here. We wanted to make sure that regardless of being a Lock Pro he won this fair and square. After doing an audit of his account, we have found that he broke some rules, and that will not be tolerated by Lock,” Lock Poker CEO Jennifer Larson stated in a press release at the time.

Of course, Macedo was not late with a sincere apology: “I’m deeply sorry for having broken the rules, but I truly had no intention of circumventing the rules in any way. Though it is no excuse, I want to be fully transparent at this point to let the poker world know what has happened and why. The computer in question was my backer, who logged into my account to check my balance and ended up playing some $25/$50 PLO while I was asleep and lost some money. Though on the merit of my own legitimate play I had enough winnings to win the Bluff Challenge, in light of the way things appear, I fully support and respect Lock’s decision to disqualify me and hand over the challenge to the second place winner. Once again, I truly regret that all of this has happened the way it has, and I hope that I can win back the generous support and understanding of the players who have believed in me so far.”

The issue was settled and Macedo was still considered an excellent talent in poker. However, the next one kicked in on 6 August 2011, when it became clear he had cheated a number of his students.

“After reviewing the skype chat logs, it became fairly clear that José was massively pushing this sauron1989 to anybody who had iPoker funds, saying that he was very bad and that everyone should play him (and let him watch when they did). I voiced my concerns to TooCuriousso1 and we proceeded to work hard to dig up evidence to prove this. Lots of circumstantial evidence was available; José’s chat logs were extremely suspect, where he would push players to play sauron1989 despite not seeming to play him himself. We soon witnessed that whenever José would disconnect from skype, sauron1989 would sign out of the ipoker lobby and would sign back in when José reconnected to skype. This happened 3 times in 20 minutes and all 3 times both José’s skype and sauron logged out and in at the same time. During our attempts to find more evidence, it became clear that José was also operating under the username of dollarman223 on the Merge network. He scammed TooCuriousso1 for $900 and appeared to be setting up another member of the group for a further scam at $50/$100, which we anticipated would be his biggest scam. Once we voiced our concerns to the rest of the group it became apparent that José was setting up quite a few of them for a scam.

“Obviously it was naiive and stupid of me and of the others to allow José to watch our screen whilst we played high stakes, but based on a few months of internet friendship and the great strategy José posted, we believed he was entirely trustworthy (despite the scepticism voiced in José’s NVG thread).

“To José’s credit, before we had fully conclusive proof, though our suspicions were becoming apparent, he confessed what he had done..." 'MossBoss' posted

As it would later turn out, Daniel ‘jungleman12’ Cates and Haseeb ‘dogishead’ Qureshi have also been involved; although they had nothing to do with scamming the students, they had used the ‘Girah’ account on multiple occasions, in addition to further multi-accounting and chip-dumping frauds. You can read more on the story here.

Following the scandal, both Macedo and Qureshi disappeared from the poker community. Only Cates stayed and it took even him a long while before he could regain its trust and respect.

Qureshi appeared again in December 2013, when he published his book How to Be a Poker Player: The Philosophy of Poker. Currently, he is working as a mind coach.

For the first time since 2011, news of Macedo has surfaced, too. The Portuguese is currently living in the UK, studying at Lancaster University. With his fellow students, he has started up a business apparently more profitable than his poker career could ever have been. He has founded a cleaning company, which started cleaning the university campus, making over €240,000 in just the first three months. Even the mainstream media has reported on their unparalleled success.

“We have started by cleaning bathrooms and bedrooms on the university campus. In only three months, we have managed to clean over 1,000 rooms. At the moment, we have many clients and we employ seven people, first we extended the service to kitchens within the campus and then overpriced to apartments off of the campus,” he explains. “It all started right away, thanks to strong demand on the part of many students,” Macedo added.

“It is not unusual to have students with good ideas. But what these guys have done more than anything else and more than anyone else, is to win the trust of their activities across the campus,” Lancaster University professor Joe Born commented.

Macedo’s success story splits the community: some are happy for him getting his life straight and leaving his faults behind, while others are unable to forgive him the frauds.