So let's go back in time to May 2023.

I just had my phone call with Martin. It was, by far, the best call I've ever had with him. We talked for awhile, nobody yelled, he was rational, and we discussed everything both past and present. I heard him out and he heard me out. He told me he had been sober for 6 months and had really turned a corner.

Of course I was very skeptical regarding how long this would last, but I didn't verbalize that. I told him good job, and at the end I told him I would let him back on the forum. He said he was concerned that if he returned, that people would relentlessly troll him and he wouldn't be able to post good content. I told him that I can't give him any special privileges or protection, but I would make sure that his serious threads (such as the ones where he'd post pics/videos) would not be disrupted by trolls.

I kept to that promise, though he became increasingly needy and kept texting me demands to delete things and/or to ban people whenever they posted photoshopped GIFs of him or whatever. He was especially infuriated by limitles, and if I didn't drop everything to "take care" of limites, he would get furious.

Still, I kept my cool and did what I promised. It is ironic that, in his last weeks before being re-banned, he was bitching about my deletion of trolling in desertrunner's threads, since that's EXACTLY what Martin kept demanding of me.



Just before the truce, I saw a video where he posted himself walking into a fairly nice beach-area house. At the time I wondered how he could afford such a thing. While on the small side, a house like that in Oceanside would have been thousands per month in rent. Was Martin really doing well enough to afford that? It was clear that, at the very least, he had access to the house, as he showed himself walking up to it, walking inside, and filming it, with nobody else apparently there. At that moment, I thought maybe he had just come back from one of his shipboard jobs and had 5 figures to his name.

This is why I was surprised when the whole Vegas trip happened, and the events which followed. The house video was posted on May 15, 2023. Two weeks later, he packed up everything and drove to Vegas. He made no more mention of the house, and claimed he might stay in Vegas permanently. He was staying at a shit motel in the ghetto, which surprised me given that he had just been renting a fairly expensive house in Oceanside.

What further surprised me was that he needed to raise money to play a $777 WSOP event. This wasn't because Martin was being frugal. It clearly seemed he didn't have the money to enter this event, and at the time, acted very grateful that I was willing to get involved to collect and distribute the money. It was essential that I meet with him to buy him in, as I wanted to make 100% certain that he would really play the event, and not just take the $ and degen it off. I guess he could have unregistered the next day, and I meant to go visit at the beginning of the event to make sure he really showed up, but he posted pics from the event so that wasn't necessary. To be fair, once he had ticket in hand, he seemed excited to play and I found it unlikely he would unregister. I didn't have much optimism that he would cash, as Marty has almost zero experience in WSOP events, and they play a lot differently than $1/$2 at Oceans 11. He didn't cash, but whatever. Only 15% do, and obviously people were putting him in to be nice, and not because they thought he was a great player.

I'll continue in the next post...