King of Grim Neil Blatchly

Anyone who has the remotest interest in poker, and many who don't have all now read about the Neil Blatchly scam. Much as I enjoy Blonde poker forum myself you do need a special needs deciphering degree to try and understand what the various phrases mean on there - every post from a regular has lots of [ ] and [X] plus abbreviatons FTW FML DUCY, words that they make their own - grim being a good example - so it's often hard work to try and figure out what someone is actually saying.

Anyway the only good thing that came out of the Blatchgate scandal was the regular posters were all so stunned at the severity of the scam that they started to post in English rather than Blondish so by page 84 it was all a bit more understandable. I think there were so many new members who didn't understand they had to talk in code to fit in with the clique that they kindof broke down the barriers by sheer volume of new posts alone.

Feel sorry for certain mates of Neil in particular Cos and George2Loose, who are both completely blameless in this and have not only been personally scammed but have also had all of their trust and friendship thrown back in their faces.

However, I think people would do well to think about who else Neil was friendly with when looking for a conspirator, other than looking at just poker buddies. Maybe a poker friend with whom he shared other hobbies, I dunno, like golf maybe? mmm.. ;)

Neil only got away with this because Blonde forum members allowed him to manipulate them all into putting him up on a pedestal of his own building: he was just too clever for them to see he provided the steps for him to climb up there. A very clever man - no one involved in this should blame themselves or kick themselves for being gullible - they weren't. Con men like this work very very hard to create an image for people to believe in. More will come out in the future - I woudl imagine we'll find that Neil has done this kind of scam before, more than once.

Don't imagine we'll be seeing him in DTD in the near future, but then again, someone as arrogant as him may really think he can convince people he was just a fool rather than a fraud.