Mizzi is innocent!

Author: Qid
Filed under: Gossip, High Stakes News, Online poker, Poker, Sorel Mizzi
Date: Oct 18,2008

High Stakes News reported yesterday that the account of well known poker pro Sorel “Imper1um” Mizzi was banned at PokerStars. The reason why this happened was unknown. Now Mizzi has responded to accusations that he was cheating and posted this reply to the 2+2 forum:

LOL , and this is why I don’t read the forums, nothing but drama and people spreading false rumors…. Initially I wasn’t going to respond to this but it seems like it’s getting a little bit out of hand.

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I only got suspended on Pokerstars and it was for a minor infraction which I don’t think I should have been suspended for in the first place.

Basically what happened was I was at the airport in Barcelona , ready to fly to London, when I realized that I had already preregistered for one of the WCOOP events ($300R PLO). Since the flight from Barcelona to London is only an hour, I called my friend (who will remain nameless) from the airpot and asked him to login and play until I arrived at my hotel and set up the internet. I ended up getting to my hotel about 1hr and a half into the tournament. I told him to log off, he did, and I continued playing the rest of the tournament.

This is the only time I’ve let anyone login to my account since the incident on FTP…. I had no malicious intent and my actions were 100% reasonable and innocent.

I knew I should have been smarter and just blinded out accepting the $300 loss. It’s evident that Pokerstars has me red flagged because they think I’m associated with JJ in more ways than I am and because of the FTP incident…. I feel like they were just waiting for me to slip up and I guess this was enough for them.

Pokerstars wanted to suspend me for 6 months but after continuous back and forth e-mails they reduced the suspension to 3 months.

Although I don’t agree with the suspension and think it’s extremely harsh given the circumstances, I can appreciate the fact that Pokerstars is enforcing their rules and doing their part in protecting the integrity of online poker.

It sure seems like Mizzi was quite harshly punished because of his history, but still he should’ve known better. Surely his account at PokerStars was under the magnifying glass after the incident that happened at Full Tilt Poker. The loss of $300 would have been minor loss comparing to having his account suspended and reputation tarnished.