Biggest chip stack, then no chip stack
For reasons unknown but which could be guessed, poker pro Ali Imsirovic was ejected from a Florida poker tournament on Thursday. It was Day 1A of the $1,200 RunGood Poker Series Main Event at bestbet Jacksonville and Imsirovic was doing very well, likely oblivious to the fact that he would soon be asked to leave.
According to PokerNews’ live reporting, there were 30 players remaining at the dinner break and Imsirovic was sitting pretty atop the leaderboard. But when the action resumed, both Imsirovic and his chip stack were gone.
And that’s it, that’s all anyone knows, or at least that’s all anyone has made known publicly. Imsirovic was the chip leader and then he was nowhere to be found.
The man has a history
But while his disappearance is technically a mystery, the logical assumption that everyone has made is that bestbet Jacksonville management kicked Ali Imsirovic out because of his history as a poker cheater.
The same thing happened in February when he played in a tournament at the Champions Club, a popular poker room in Houston, Texas. Once staff realized he had registered, he was quickly refunded his buy-in and asked to leave.
At the time, Champions Club President Isaac Trumbo told PokerNews, “Champions is committed, first and foremost, to the protection of our members. If poker is going to continue to thrive, the community must be able to trust operators to prioritize game integrity above all else, including our bottom line.”
From about 2019 to 2021, Imsirovic crushed high roller tournaments and won numerous accolades, including 2021 GPI Player of the Year. But in 2022, he faced numerous accusations of cheating, including multi-accounting and using real-time assistance (RTA) apps in online poker and colluding in live tournaments.
The PokerGO Tour suspended him (and Jake Schindler) in mid-2022 and even before that, though the poker room didn’t name him, his was presumed to be one of a number of accounts banned on GGPoker.
Admitted to some of the charges
In June 2023, Imsirovic posted a video to YouTube where he admitted to some of the cheating allegations. Among them was multi-tabling on GGPoker in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns. He said he largely did it in retaliation for other people cheating and then stopped when he thought better of it. He picked it back up, though, when he got angry at people accusing him of doing exactly what he had been doing.
Multi-accounting – playing on more than one account during a tournament to give oneself a better chance to win – is the only transgression to which Imsirovic admitted. He denied the accusation of ghosting players he had backed in tournaments and strongly denied Alex Foxen’s allegation that he looked at Paul Phua’s hole cards during a Triton Poker tournament.
Image credit: PokerGO.com
