Trust could be an issue
Bryn Kenney, the second-winningest live tournament player of all time, is a co-founder of an upcoming new online poker room called 4Poker. A new poker room led by one of poker’s most successful players would be news in and of itself, but the real twist here is that Kenney has also been credibly accused of running a poker cheating ring by multiple players this year.
While most of the accusations have been just that, accusations (though they were from multiple professional poker players), some messages between Kenney and others involved have been made public that do point to the veracity of the accusations.
As such, the fact that Bryn Kenney is now one of the leaders of a soon-to-launch (Q4 2022) online poker room is a dubious development. The optimist might say that if he has cheated, he will know what to look for when it comes to the policing of the tables, but that is a very optimistic outlook. The more realistic and prevailing opinion in the poker community, it seems, is that a poker room with an allegedly prolific cheater at its head is not the sort of place one would want to park their money.
Experience at the top
Were it not for Kenney, 4Poker might be an interesting site to look at, as the rest of the leadership team is made up of industry veterans, including COO Heath Cram, who spent most of the last decade and a half at PokerStars. It’s basically a team of people who know online poker deciding to try their hand at starting from scratch and competing with the big boys like Stars and GGPoker.
In an interview with Poker.org, Cram said, “PokerStars was incredibly good to me for many years, so poker remains close to my heart. This is why I am so excited that a poker start-up even exists, and as a bonus – much of the original PokerStars DNA, I see now at 4Poker.”
He added that the idea of 4Poker is to create a “poker for players, by players” type of room that can fill a niche in the industry voided by the more “corporate” online poker sites.
That, of course, leads to the question as to how a site can be “for players” when one of its founders has allegedly led a large-scale cheating ring (again, alleged, but also again, the accusations do seem credible).
Poker.org asked Cram about Kenney and it should not come as a surprise that he is on his side.
“The truth is, as always,” Cram said, “I’ll make my own judgement of people, and in the past few weeks, I have had the pleasure of not only spending time with Bryn and other investors in person but meeting his family and loved ones.”
“I frankly haven’t spent time with someone with as much passion for poker and people since working for PokerStars’ founding owners,” he added.
Image credit: PokerGO.com
