Brian Townsend Multi-Accounting Scandal Exposed

Brian Townsend is a well known poker pro who has been known to play a lot of online poker and recently he has been exposed in a multi-account scandal. Brian who typically plays poker at the high stake tables on Full Tilt and Poker Stars decided to create a multiple account to play at the lower stakes. It’s difficult for a poker pro to get any action at the low stakes table which is why Brian said he made his multiple account. The opinions of the poker world so far seem to be very different from each other with some feeling it was justified while others think it’s unfair and against the rules.

Brian runs a poker blog over at CardRunners.com and this is where he has just posted his public apology to everyone. Basically what happened is Brian was playing on Full Tilt poker with the alias Stellarnebula and on Poker Stars with the alias Makersmark66. He was using the accounts for the past six months and generally playing at the $25/$50, $50/$100 and $100/$200 PLO. He was also at this time using his Brian Townsend account at the $50/$100 and $200/$400 PLO, but he never played at the same table with any of his accounts.

In light of this whole situation Brian Townsend has decide that he will donate $25,000 to an unannounced charity that will be named in the future. I don’t really see what this is showing because $25,000 isn’t very much to Brian, but it’s also better then keeping all of the money he made off of his alias accounts. From reading his apology blog post I came to the conclusion that he’s being sincere in his apology, but that still doesn’t make what he did right. A lot of people we’re basically cheated out of money by a pro poker player playing under aliases that he wasn’t suppose to be playing under.

Brian has since cleared his online poker accounts and has left $100,000 for his main account in which he hopes to double and then triple up this coming year. He won’t be going anywhere this means, but I’m sure he won’t be playing under anymore aliases any time soon. Brian has mentioned that he will continue managing CardRunners and that everyone can expect some more top of the line instructional videos to come out in the near future.

It took a real man to apologize to his peers and the online poker community and I feel we all need to respect the fact that he did come clean. A lot of people would have just run, but Brian is willing to face the music for what he did, and for this I believe he’s a real stand-up guy. We’ve all made mistakes, and most of us couldn’t say we wouldn’t do exactly what Brian has done if we had the opportunity. If you want to ask questions or read the questions being asked to Brian you can find threads on the CardRunner Forums and also the 2+2 Forums.