It Just Had to Happen

I read this week of the well known Swedish poker pro Ken Lennaard being involved in some sort of cheating scandal and then being absent from the recent poker nations cup. Apparently this was not hot air either as this has actually been confirmed as I understand it by reports on various poker sites. Well for anyone who read my earlier blog about poker not needing to have a credibility issue at this present time, I hate to say it but I told you so.

But this is only big news because poker is big news. Stories like this will be something new to many of the players who have recently come into the game but cheating in poker is as old as the game itself and will never go away and certainly not now with prize money and available earnings far and above what they have ever been.

But incidents like these just give the powers that be more fuel to intervene with even more laws and restrictions because to them, poker is shady and it is gambling and it is infested by criminals and low life. They cannot see beyond that and the last thing that they need is further incentives to get involved. But cheating and scamming seems to be a global pastime these days, it seems to me that at times, half the population is busy trying to rip off the other half.

Yes….it is a sad cruel world in which we live but please take comfort in the fact that incidents like these are not common when put against the relative amount of poker action that there is out there. Like I put on a recent forum post, it is just as much a mistake to think that all poker games are crooked as it is to think that they are all straight. The truth lays somewhere in between and you must protect yourself from that truth.