Earlier this year, an affluent gambler from Dubai visited the Les Ambassadeurs casino in London where he lost at the high-stakes poker tables to the tune of £185,000. Then in May, the gambler, identified as Iraj Parvizi, filed a lawsuit against the casino establishment for £10 million claiming that the poker game was unfair and that other participants were colluding against him. At that time, no other names were revealed, but it’s recently come to light that the alleged colluders are UK pro poker players Roland de Wolfe and Josh Gould.
OnlinePokerRealMoney.co.uk tries to dispel some legal confusions stemming from passage of George Bush's UIGEA of 2006 . Federal status seems to depend on interpretation of the wire act and other laws which were crafted many years ago and which remained high level in nature. The United Kingdom has much clearer laws including their own real money gambling commission .
Roland de Wolfe has been grinding the live and virtual felt for years, racking up over $5 million in live tournament cashes and thousands more at online poker events. Josh Gould’s tournament experience isn’t quite so munificent, but he is better known for his cash game play, pocketing countless winnings over his professional career. Both are considered elite players in the UK poker community, but their reputations have been tarnished since Parvizi hired a so-called expert to back his case.
Enter stage left, Richard Marcus, the self-proclaimed “World’s #1 casino and poker cheating expert”. Marcus earned his title after spending 2 years as a dealer in Las Vegas, followed by 25 years of admitted cheating at the casino and poker tables. Parvizi solicited Marcus to act as an “expert” witness in his case against the London casino, and his statements were what exposed the identities of de Wolfe and Gould in the supposed cheating scandal.
After viewing the surveillance videos from the night in question, Marcus stated that the poker session in which Parvizi lost £185k was “utterly corrupted by collusion on the part of Josh Gould and Roland de Wolfe.” Marcus further implored his belief, saying, “I will not even concede to a small probability that this poker game… was fair and above board.”
According to Parvizi, Roland de Wolfe and Josh Gould worked together, coercing the Dubai gambler to bet more money and subsequently splitting the winnings. However, journalist and editor for UK news publication The Telegraph, Harriet Dennys pointed out that Iraj Parvizi has a “closer connection with collusion than most”. Parvizi has been heavily involved in another lawsuit since October 2012; one in which he’s been accused of committing securities fraud in one of the largest insider-trading investigations the Financial Conduct Authority has ever pursued, known as Operation Tabernula.
The £10,000,000 lawsuit against the casino, which gained fame in 1962 for being the filming location of the classic James Bond film, “Dr. No”, is allegedly justified by Parvizi’s accusation that the establishment not only allowed collusion to occur, but may have even assisted in the cheating scandal. Parvizi said that the casino had new masseuses on staff that night, inculpating them for potentially looking at players’ cards and signaling their identity to the charged colluders. However, that claim is highly discreditable as his only evidence to support the accusation is the fact that the he had never seen the new masseuses before in the casino.
After the poker session in which Parvizi was playing on credit, the accuser cancelled the check issued to pay the £185k gambling debt, choosing to file a lawsuit instead. Les Ambassadeurs has denied any knowledge of cheating at its establishment, calling the whole ordeal an “embarrassment”.
Of interesting note, when the investigation first began, an anonymous player who is a high-rolling regular at the London casino, told the Daily Mail, “No one would need to cheat to beat Iraj. We’re professionals and he’s terrible, so it’s like Brazil versus San Marino in football. As a professional player, you sometimes need credit and you rely on your reputation. I’d rather lose than collude.”