Did Ali Imsirovic Accounts Flood High Stakes Tournaments?

The Ali Imsirovic cheating saga took another twist when it was revealed that he may have had as many as 50% of the accounts playing in small-field high stakes online tournaments...

Imsirovic’s ill-conceived and poorly-received admission of multi-accounting on multiple occasions has apparently back-fired, with members of the poker community doing a deep-dive into his illicit activities.

Among the accounts believed to have been run by Imsirovic during his 2020 pandemic cheating spree on GGPoker was the epically-named Multi Account...

The list of names attributed to the young Bosnian-American pro at the heart of one of the biggest cheating scandals has not yet been 100% verified.

However, it is almost certain that a large number of the accounts belong to Imsirovic, their ‘lifespan’ matching the dates he admitted to beginning his cheating and ending when he was finally banned by GGPoker.

Although he had $320,000 confiscated by the site for RTA-use, with multi-accounting later added to his breaches when he tried to fight the ban, it is likely that his cheating gained him much more.

The figure of $500k in winnings in the graph shown above, with at one point a $1.2million upswing, show how potentially lucrative the highstakes online games can be.

Imsirovic himself described the online highstakes action as “insane” when the Covid pandemic hit, revealing: “We were all playing a ridiculous amount of buy-ins every day.”

He then confessed to cheating the games “for 4 or 5 months” with the excuse that he believed there was “a lot of shady shit happening in those games” and that other players were “card-sharing, multi-ing and working as teams.”

He also confessed to multi-accounting again, though he didn’t say on which site or sites, after he was publicly outed for his cheating.

With the highstakes online MTTs often having as few as 40 runners, the idea that Imsirovic potentially had half of the field is extremely worrying.

It would also negate his insistence that his cheating was somehow minor compared to the allegations he denied of live cheating, RTA-use, and running a ghosting stable.

As Irish pro and poker writer David K. Lappin described Imsirovic’s apology, made with his GPI trophies in the background, they appear to be, “Empty words spoken by a hollow man surrounded by pewter tat, for that is all that trophies are when you cheated to win them.”

With a Doug Polk investigation video set to drop later today, promising “shocking evidence – proof of the cheating – just not exactly as you think,” this story looks set to run and run, much like Imsirovic’s online cheating.