The international professional poker community is extremely well networked and players are judged on the reputation they have in the market which makes it extremely important for them to conduct themselves with a high level of ethics. Over the last couple of years, a number of poker players have been accused of unprofessional conduct and a lack of ethics including legendary poker player Phil Ivey, who was accused of edge sorting in two casinos.
The recent poker player to be in the eye of the storm is Dwyte Pilgrim, the World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open champion. He has been accused of being a hustler and a con artist by fellow poker player and one time friend Aaron Massey. Poker players often lend money and help stake fellow poker players and those deeds are never brought to the public because it gets settled as agreed.
Massey has accused Pilgrim of constantly hustling him for cash and then later using a number of excuses to avoid paying back the loan. The two had developed a friendship over the last three years as they often played the same poker tournaments and used to encourage each other to not give up.
Massey stated that Pilgrim took advantage of this friendship during Jan 2013 when they were both at the Borgata casino and sold him a story of his account being frozen and then put pressure on Massey to loan him $7,500 so that he could take part in the tournament.
While Massey wasn’t too keen to part with the money, the constant pressure of helping a friend in need and the promise that the money would be paid back in a short time frame, convinced him to part with the money. Over two years have passed since he loaned him the money but Pilgrim has apparently never paid back the money, constantly lied when asked about a payment plan and now appears to have no intention of paying back the money.
When Massey checked with some of the other players he heard a similar tale of how Pilgrim hustled people for money and then never paid them back. In a statement, Massey speaking about his efforts to recover the loan from Pilgrim said
He basically told me that if I kept talking to him that way that my life may be in jeopardy. He was even brazen enough to text me threats as well. As you can see, Dwyte will take advantage of anyone. The haves, the have not’s, the flush, the bust, it just doesn’t matter to him. He’s a preservationist, a parasite, willing to survive by any means necessary. His prey is any human being with money. Anyone he can take advantage of. He is a self-serving con artist
