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Written by Marcus | Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
A few weeks ago, Jason Ho, instructor of poker at StoxPoker, was ousted from his position as instructor after allegations were made that he misrepresented his history as a professional poker player. It came out that he had acted deviously against his students and fellow instructors. Now StoxPoker is in the headlines again, this time regarding founding member, Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien, who has admitted to using multiple player accounts at different online poker rooms. Grudzien has resigned from StoxPoker.
The scandal broke on March 12th at TwoPlusTwo, online poker forum, when David “Viffer” Peat, high stakes poker pro, posted a thread titled, “Stoxtrader cheating/multi accounting discussion,” and immediately garnered a great deal of buzz. The post claimed that “Stoxtrader” and “40putts” were one in the same person. In the same post, Viffer also declared that the user had short stacked and ratholed games, which is not against the rules, but is frowned upon by other users. The thread resulted in accusations of collusion, as well.
Viffer later posted that “40putts” and “knockstiff” had been in fact accused of possible collusion in past threads, but it was unclear whether or not these allegations were proven true. Other online poker bigwigs also posted under the thread, including Tom “durrrrr” Dwan, Aaron “AE Jones” Jones, and Randy “nanonoko” Lew. Grudzien then replied in post #43 of the thread that he had not multi-accounted “for the purpose of deceiving others into giving the action, evading taxes, collusion, entering multiple times into the same tournament, ghosting, to obscure previous results and stats, to clear extra bonuses, to circumvent affiliate CPA or rakeback rules, to bypass the poker sites’ shortstack buy-in time limitation, to team play, to share action with others at the same table, to chip dump, or otherwise engage in underhanded actions I do not know about.”
Grudzien continued, stating that he had shortstacked during games that were tough and posted a Holdem Manager report of winnings by stack size. This report presented 262,130 hands of poker as a shortstacker (under fifty big blinds). Additional allegations against Grudzien accused him of multi-accounting within the thread, which made Grudzien look worse and worse.
On March 18th, on his personal blog, Grudzien posted his resignation from StoxPoker.com, stating that he had put his company in a difficult place regarding the negative publicity that was surrounding his name. He also admitted to multi-accounting, but claimed he had not used the multiple accounts for advantageous reasons or to play simultaneously. He even confirmed that he had two player accounts at both Full Tilt and PokerStars for four years. Known as “stoxtrader” on both sites, he used this account to prepare and produce poker teaching videos, playing in lower stakes games than he normally did.
He also admitted to playing as “40putts” on Full Tilt and “knockstiff” on PokerStars, which he played his normal games under, until January of this year. He explained that he decided to change names in January for reasons he couldn’t say, but it was the same reason he wasn’t active at TwoPlusTwo to defend himself in the accusatory thread. His new accounts, “gr3atvlebr0” and “bulltf0rdtuff”he claims were only used for one month and haven’t been used since. However, it has been confirmed that both accounts were used on February 28th.
His blog post ended with an apology for breaking the rules of poker sites and a statement suggesting that he’d return to TwoPlusTwo and Stox as a contributor in the future. In wake of all the controversy and negative press surrounding StoxPoker, the site is losing positive reputation fast. But other top poker instructors such as Matt Bolt and Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt have already found a new home at a new online poker training website that is growing in popularity, DragTheBar.com.
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