NOTE: This article was originally published on Tuesday, December 5, but was inadvertently deleted after some IT migration.
The latest scandal in the poker world involves Nik Airball, Wesley Fei, and Ye “Mars” Shen, all of whom play on the Hustler Casino Live stream. Over the weekend, Airball and Fei accused Mars of introducing marked decks in a high stakes cash game he hosted in California. And now Mars has struck back.
The quick summary of the accusations is that Mars combined his regular private high stakes game in Yorba Linda, California, with that of another host. Wesley said that Mars had offered to bring the deck, which was later found out to have been marked with UV ink that could be read with special glasses or contact lenses.
Wesley and Nik claim that Mars and the group of players he brought to the game won more than $3 million over a number of sessions.
Mars has since written an e-mail to PokerNews defending himself and denying all accusations.
“I have won and lost huge amounts numerous times in my poker career, but I have never cheated in a game, and I have always paid when I lost,” he said.
He also accused Wesley not only of lying about the situation, but of lying about how flush with cash he is in order to “portray a certain image.” Mars said that Wesley is accusing him to try to get out of the losses he owes.
As for the marked deck, Mars says he did not bring it. In the e-mail, he said that a person named Zeo called him to co-host a game at his apartment and both of them discussed bringing players to the game. Mars offered to bring the decks of cards and Zeo could supply the dealer. A couple hours after the conversation, the venue was changed to Yorba Linda, so Mars did not have to supply any cards, since they were already there.
Mars claims that there were already half a dozen people seated at the poker table when he arrived and it would have been impossible to introduce his own deck if he wanted to. He added that he thought Zeo might have been the one to supply the marked deck, but as they arrived at about the same time, he changed his mind.
Mars continued, saying that three weeks after the game in which the marked deck was discovered, a player named Sun, who had gone back to China, told him that he had introduced the doctored deck to try to recover some of his losses. Mars then told the owner of the house what he had found out, with witnesses present.
Mars apologized to the rest of the players in the game for not being able to detect the cheating earlier.
