Canadian professional poker player Sorel Mizzi plays on the online poker room PokerStars using the moniker “Imper1um”.

While Mizzi was waiting to catch a flight from Barcelona to London for the World Series of poker Europe he realized that he was registered to play in the $300 PL Omaha Event of the World Championship of Online Poker hosted by PokerStars.

Therefore he asked a friend to log into his account and start playing as “Imper1um”. When Mizzi reached his hotel in London, The friend logged out and Mizzi took over. This constituted multi-accounting, a practice banned by all online poker sites rooms including pokerstars. 

Since Mizzi was not a first time offender, PokerStars thought fit to give him a six month ban from their poker room with effect from October 5. Mizzi then communicated with PokerStars, pleaded guilty, explained the reasons that led to his error, apologized and had the ban reduced to three months. Mizzi was first caught in the multi-accounting web when his friend Josh “JJProdigy” Field was banned from the PokerStars online poker room in 2006. Field succeeded in creating several accounts on PokerStars even after the ban with the help of friends, of whom Mizzi was believed to be one. Mizzi was directly caught multi-accounting on Full Tilt Poker late in 2007.

His friend and Bluff Magazine editor Chris Vaughn was participating in the Sunday $1 Million Guaranteed Tournament. With three tables left to go Vaughn sold his account to Mizzi. As destiny would have it Mizzi won the tournament in Vaughn’s name. They were caught and retribution was swift and terrible. Vaughn was disqualified, he had his winnings forfeited and both he and Mizzi were banned for life from Full Tilt Poker. The punishment meted out by PokerStars is a walk in the park by comparison.

It is sad that one of the best online tournament players should resort to multi-accounting. Despite his apology to PokerStars, if one looks at views on multi-accounting aired by Mizzi in the past, one can sense a repetition of the event sooner rather than later. In the first instance Mizzi does not consider what he did at Full Tilt Poker as cheating or even multi-accounting because it was done on the spur of the moment without intent to hurt anyone.

This is obviously naivety on Mizzi’s part because the person he defeated would have definitely been aggrieved. He also proclaimed that he had never multi-accounted in the past and that the Full Tilt incident was a one-off one. Even if the poker fraternity believed him then, it is unlikely to do so now. What Mizzi finally said is the most disconcerting. He said, “The fact of the matter is that – yes, there’s a lot of things going on where players are being ghosted in the middle or in the late stages of the tournament by a better player and this is – this is something that can never be regulated. …But, I know that it goes on in the high limits and in the low limits and there’s absolutely nothing that can be done.” Now is this the ranting of someone who has been caught or is it a malaise that runs deep in the poker world.