Chip leader vanishes
Ali Imsirovic was at the top of the poker world just a few years ago, but accusations of rampant cheating – and an admission to some of them – made him persona non grata in the poker world. That status remains, as he was kicked out of a live poker tournament for the second time in just a few months.
chip leader at the dinner break
Imsirovic hasn’t shown his face often at live tournaments in the last couple of years, but he signed up to play in the $1,200 RunGood Poker Series Main Event at bestbet Jacksonville this week. According to PokerNews, he was the chip leader at the dinner break on Thursday’s Day 1A, but when play picked back up, his chip stack was nowhere to be found and his seat was empty.
Tournament staff told the media outlet that despite his lofty perch on the leaderboard, Imsirovic was no longer in the event. Though that is all the information offered, the consensus theory is that he was told to leave because of his history as an admitted poker cheat.
From hero to zero
Imsirovic was the toast of the poker world in 2021, destroying fields in high roller tournaments and winning three Global Poker Awards, including GPI Player of the Year.
In 2022, though, multiple people, including Alex Foxen, accused Imsirovic of a litany of transgressions, including colluding in live tournaments and multi-accounting, ghosting, and using real-time assistance (RTA) in online games.
The PokerGO Tour figured out something was up and suspended Imsirovic during the 2022 season.
And those weren’t even the latest accusations. Rumors floated about him in 2020, when it was assumed that he was one of a few dozen accounts banned at GGPoker. The online poker room did not release names, but when Imsirovic, who had been so prominent on the site, suddenly stopped playing there just before the bans, everyone basically knew.
Defiant admission of guilt
In 2023, Imsirovic posted a nearly half-hour video admitting to some cheating, while vehemently denying other allegations. It was a messy speech, described by our own David Lappin as “not just woefully inadequate, but it bordered on parody, straight out of the Bill Clinton ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ or Donald Trump ‘locker room talk’ playbook.”
Imsirovic said that for about four to five months during the 2020 COVID-10 lockdowns, he did multi-account on GGPoker, supposedly stopping because he realized it was wrong. Not coincidentally, that was the same time his account was banned.
admitted to multi-accounting online again in 2022
He also admitted to multi-accounting online again in 2022, saying that lots of other players were also cheating.
Imsirovic denied ghosting, using RTA, and chip-dumping to his horses in tournaments. He also explained away Foxen’s accusations of repeatedly looking at Paul Phua’s hole cards during a Triton tournament.
Since then, Imsirovic has mostly stayed away from live poker tournaments. He had seven recorded cashes last year, including a near-final table in the $1,500 “The Closer” event at the World Series of Poker.
