Vaughn, Mizzi Come Clean

Chris Vaughn, Managing Editor for Bluff Magazine, and top online poker player, Sorel Mizzi, have admitted to “account selling” in an interview with PokerNews.com. 

Back in October, Vaughn won both the Full Tilt $1 Million guaranteed tournament and the PokerStars Sunday Millions tournament on back-to-back weekends.  This is a heck of an accomplishment for even the best pros, but for an amateur, this was unheard of. 

Last week, Soren Kongsgaard, the runner-up in the Full Tilt tournament, was informed by Full Tilt Poker that he was “…among the victims of one player using more than one Full Tilt account in the tournament. Late into the tournament, a player who had already been eliminated took over the account of a player who was still in, which is against our tournament rules.” 

Kongsgaard was declared the winner and awarded first place money, about $76,000 more than he had originally won. 

While it had not been 100% confirmed last week, word around the internet is that Vaughn actually “sold” his “BluffCVMag” account to a top player, allowing the player to step in for him to finish the tournament.  This new player then received some portion of the winnings.  The player that took over the account was rumored to be Mizzi, who is known as "Imper1um" online. 

It turned out all the rumors were true.  Vaughn did sell the account to Mizzi when the tournament was down to about three tables.  Vaughn says that he had been having connection problems and originally contacting Mizzi over instant message to ask him to take over for a few minutes while he went over to the Bluff offices to play on a hopefully better connection.  But, as Vaughn admitted, “…it pretty quickly led to a discussion about selling the account rather than just letting him play for a few minutes.” 

Mizzi claims that he has never done anything like this before and did not do it with the thought that he would be cheating other players.  “I acted fast without malice and didn't intend to hurt Chris and myself, opponents, or the entire poker community. This is something that was a one-time…” he told PokerNews.  “…I want to make it clear that this is something that was an isolated incident and it's not something that I've done in the past.” 

While in the portion of the interview that has been published (part two will come later), both players do express some remorse for what they did, Mizzi also simply seemed sorry that he got caught.  “…out of the five or six years that online poker has been – has been going, no one's been penalized for this kind of activity,” he said.. “ So, with that in mind, I never – I didn't give it much thought…” 

Earlier in the interview, Mizzi said, “…I know it's not against the rules – whether or not it's ethical or unethical is another question and that's for each individual person to decide for themselves…”

In this writer’s opinion, this last statement says, “I don’t think it was unethical, but some may.” 

Fortunately, the cheating was easy to catch because the two players did not put much thought into it.  By logging into Vaughn’s account from his own computer, Mizzi left an easy data trail that Full Tilt could follow.  Unfortunately, with some planning, cheating like this is tough to stop.