Media-Peeker Poker Cheat is Convicted and Nets Three and half Years in Prison

This poker cheat will have lots of time to reflect

His name is Ali Tekintamgac. He was born in Turkey but now has German citizenship.

And he's just set a record for the longest prison term ever given to a poker cheat--3.5 years.

Tekintamgac is a champion. In 2010 he won more than $300,000 at the Spanish World Poker Tour Championship. But later that year he was refused entry at the Partouche Poker Tour main event after allegations of cheating began to surface.

The alleged cheating-tactic employed by Tekintamgac was using phony media members (or sometimes real ones) of supplying him with information about opponents hands during big poker tournaments. These media guys used their cameras to zoom-in on poker hands of players across the table from Tekintamgac, then signalled the poker cheat the value of their hole cards.

This was pretty well caught on video.

Apparently, there were a handful of accomplices involved in the poker-cheat plot and one of them flipped on Tekintamgac to testify against him.

My take: I have for more than a decade been talking, writing and blogging about the wide scale cheating in major poker tournaments across the world. As entry fields in these events keep on growing, the old favorable poker-tournament method of cheating, collusion and chip-dumping, is not as profitable as it once was, therefore, poker tournament cheats need to invent new creative methods like Tekintamgac has.

All in all, I am quite surprised by the severity of the sentence, even more so that it came out of Germany.