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I screwed up, on a practical, maturity and most importantly, ethical level. I’ve let everyone down including myself and for that I am very sorry.

The past month has been the hardest month of my life. I’ve never gone through anything like this before. In all facets of life, I’ve worked hard to develop a good honest reputation. But now that I’ve severely messed up, I have undone all that hard work.

For those of you that aren’t aware of the situation, I recently got caught by PartyPoker and PokerStars using multiple accounts in tournaments. There were six different PartyPoker accounts that I used. For big tournaments, I would often use these accounts to enter a single tournament with four entries. (I used all six once or twice, but generally used four) I did this by exploiting a bug which let you open multiple PartyPoker clients on your computer simply by clicking on the icon rapidly. On PokerStars, I had a single extra account which was mostly used by people other than me, but occasionally I did use it to double enter large PokerStars tournaments.

At that time, I unfortunately did not realize that what I was doing was unethical. For starters, many of the poker players that I have learned from were using the same practice. This obviously doesn’t make it ok, but I wasn’t questioning it at the time. Until recently; this wasn’t a well hidden fact. People seemed to accept it as ok and talked about it in the open.

Also, the idea was NOT to collude or chip dump with myself in any way. I only multi accounted in tournaments with thousands of players where it would be very unlikely for me to ever end up at the same table as myself. If the goal was collusion, I would have multi-entered smaller tournaments like sit’n’gos. This is something that I have never done.

For months and months, this practice was going on. It wasn’t until February 12th that the issue became public. ABlackCar won the $200 tournament on PartyPoker for $140,000, and it was discovered that JJProdigy was playing this account, even though JJProdigy had entered the same tournament on his own name as well. Despite a story about his grandmother playing the account until Josh (JJProdigy) took over, PartyPoker determined that both accounts were being played not only from the same IP address, but from the same unique computer identification number. As a result, Party confiscated $140,000 from ABlackCar and distributed it amongst the players in the tournament by effectively moving them up one place in the pay scale. Also, the $40,000 remaining in JJProdigy’s account was taken, and both accounts were permanently closed.

On February 23rd, I received an email from PartyPoker saying that all six accounts that I had used had been closed, and all the money in them had been confiscated. The total money confiscated was around $100,000 and included my PPM Cruise Package. On February 26th, PokerStars also came to the conclusion that I was multi-accounting tournaments. They close my accounts as well. They then conducted an investigation and determined that $3445.75 was won using this practice. They confiscated that amount of money, and returned the rest before closing my two accounts permanently.

I don’t think Party handled the situation as well as they could have. The money taken from me was won legitimately, almost entirely from sit’n’gos. None of the other accounts I used had any big tournament scores; in fact, they lost money overall in the few tournaments that they entered. Party has a zero tolerance policy which in my opinion is unfair. If I had only double entered a single $10 tournament, by the same policy, that would be grounds for them to confiscate $100,000 from me which seems unreasonable. The punishment was arbitrary, and no investigation was done to determine a reasonable adjustment. I feel like the amount of my punishment has been determined by what was in my account, rather than by what a thorough investigation would have determined.

Some players have begun to question my two recent tournament wins. Lee Jones publicly stated the following, “His big tournament win on PokerStars was legitimate (we checked it carefully).” PartyPoker has not made any similar statements, but my second place finish in the million guaranteed was legitimate as well. I have the hand histories to prove this, and if the good people at www.twoplustwo.com are willing to have me back, I will gladly post the hand history as proof. I will be taking some time away from 2+2 as well as poker in general to allow time for forgiveness, but I hope that people will eventually be able to welcome me back.

In the past month, I have come to many realizations. Once the [censored] hit the fan with Josh, I did some thinking and determined that it was indeed wrong to enter tournaments on multiple accounts. I have not done it since the JJProdigy incident, and I will never do it again.

I have many friends that have multi-accounted tournaments in the past. To my knowledge, they have all stopped, but I want to encourage them to talk to me if they still do it. I will explain to them exactly why it is wrong on both an ethical and practical level.

For starters, it is against the spirit of the game. In poker, there should be no situation where you have knowledge of more than one hand. Even the chance of this occurring is against the spirit of the game. It doesn’t matter if there’s a 9/10 chance or a 1/10,000 chance of ending up at the same table as yourself; that chance existing is against the spirit of the game.

It also leads to many gray areas in terms of ethics that should not exist at all. How many accounts is it ok to play with? Is two any better than fifty? What number of players in the tournament makes it ok? It’s obviously wrong in a 10 player tournament, but what about 100, 1,000 or 10,000? There is no one number at which you can draw a line and say, with 673 players or more it’s ok. Also, if you do happen to wind up at the same table as yourself, what is proper protocol? Should you try to play normal? Should you sit one account out? What if there are 5 people at your table each with two accounts making up ten players? Is there any way that game can be on the level? The answer to these questions isn’t important. What’s important is that you should never have to ask these questions in poker. There should be no gray area.

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about the perception of poker. It’s a shame that poker has always had such a negative connotation because of cheaters. Just take a look at movies like Rounders and TV shows like Tilt. That’s not poker. I’ve always felt that players need to work hard to get rid of these false perceptions, because they hurt the future of poker. I can’t express with words how ashamed I am that I’ve completely gone against this and I’m now part of the problem rather than the solution. A few people have expressed their fear of playing at online poker sites because they don’t have proper detection methods against “people like me”. I obviously never wanted to be seen in this way, but I’m reaping what I’ve sown and will do everything I can to change this.

Most importantly, I’ve been thinking a lot about my character. In general, I’m a nice guy. I always try to be respectful of other people, and I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I’ve always wanted to be viewed as an ethical citizen, and up until recently, I believe I’ve deserved that view. Because of my actions, that’s no longer the case. My reputation has always been extremely important to me, but now I’ve compromised that. I’ve been getting a lot of heat lately, and I deserve it. I’ve been a huge hypocrite, and I didn’t realize it until recently. There is now a cloud over my poker accomplishments, and I vow to be the person I need to be to earn back trust in the poker community.

To those that have supported me, I want to say thank you. I have received a ton of emails mostly saying the same thing. They affirm that what I did was wrong, but what I do now will determine who I will be as a person. For the most part, they have been very encouraging. I’m extremely grateful there are so many people out there willing to express their faith in me after what I have done. It is times like these when a person finds out who his true friends are. I can’t tell you how important those of you that have stuck by me have been. This experience has been bleak, but it would have been unbearable without you.

As for what the future holds, I’m not entirely sure. No matter what, I will return to poker. Poker has been my passion, and I can’t picture myself doing anything else. I hope that I can one day reclaim my reputation. Obviously this will take years and not days, and I accept this.

Finally, to my readers I want to apologize again. I screwed up, and now I’m paying the price. My judgment was horrendous, and I hope that you guys will one day forgive me.

— Justin Bonomo