Recently on FTR.com we introduced you to the story of Jose Mecado, who is well-known in the poker world for his meteoric rise through the online stakes, and for his subsequent admission that he was scamming players on the Merge Network.  Mecado also admitted that he was helping other poker pros find action on lesser-known sites by misrepresenting their identities.  As it turns out, well-known Full Tilt player Dan ‘jungleman12’ Cates was one of the primary parties in this case, as Cates himself admitted in an interview last week.

After spending much time reading/listening to the interviews that Noah Stephens-Davidowitz and Vanessa Selbst conducted recently, I can assure you that many details of the story are drawn out and sometimes confusing, but here is the basic fact pattern:  Daniel Cates and fellow poker players Haseeb Qureshi and Ashton Griffin were living in Orlando, FL as of late 2010 and early 2011.  During that time, Cates and Qureshi decided to stake online phenom Jose “Girah” Mercado, who had supposedly turned $30 into a bankroll of several hundred thousand dollars.  Qureshi would hype Mecado as a poker whiz on all sorts of social media platforms, and that led to Mecado being given pro status on a European skin, at which point Mecado also began “coaching” poker players over Skype.  His coaching allowed him to watch their play and exploit it later on as they played matches against players that Mecado had arranged ahead of time.

In addition to Mecado’s own personal transgressions, which seemed at first to only involve him, the interviews made it clear (initially) that it was Haseeb Qureshi who was controlling the accounts that he and Mecado were using to knowingly scam other players.  But as it turns out, Daniel Cates was using the accounts as well, saying that there were at least four sessions where he was the one playing under a known screen name belonging to either Qureshi or Mecado.

What made the interviews quite revealing was that as the details unfolded, Cates’s knowledge of the staking and financial details surrounding Jose Mecado was (or seemed to be) so limited.  He often deflected questions with answers that implied that Haseeb was the one handling all of the details, even though there was a $100K stake at risk routinely with this player.  Cates is free to treat money as lightly as he wants to, but at the end of the day this will be another significant black eye for online poker in general.  It reintroduces the omnipresent possibility that online players can be (and often are) cheated, scammed, and swindled out of their bankrolls with few or no options for recourse.

At the end of the day, one of the great constants in poker is that it is a game of boundaries – – the rules and ethos of the game allow you (and perhaps even require you) to be chillingly deceptive within the game itself, but beyond the dealing of cards and exchanging of chips, the framework of poker is actually one with a high moral and ethical code when it comes to cheaters and cheating.  Western gunslingers were shot over misdeals, and online players have been banned from sites for breaching a site’s Terms of Service.  In either case, the moral and ethical fiber of the game was violated, as is the case with these players and their actions on the Merge Network.  Unfortunately for Cates, Mecado, and Qureshi, there isn’t a gray area when it comes to multi-accounting, as Cates wishfully implies at the end of the interview.  Poker is a game of strict codes of conduct, and when they are broken, the entire community suffers.

Hopefully, Cates will learn from his mistakes, live up to whatever punishments are deemed appropriate, and move forward as a positive influence in the game.  Right now, we need all the positive influences that we can get in the live and online poker world.