The First Major Poker RTA Scandal In 2025: Did Nacho Barbero Cheat?
The last day of January 2025 gave poker players the gift no one wants: another story of alleged cheating of the poker network team member in one of their own rooms. Discussion around whether Argentinian high roller and WPN ambassador Nacho Barbero used RTA during an online poker session or not heated up quickly. And on each turn it had been becoming only weirder culminating in a little comic but also a disturbing story for the poker community.
In this article Pokeroff.com retells the timeline of the scandal that took place between January 31st and February 4th, 2025 due to fault (or malice?) of Nacho Barbero.
What is Nacho Barbero Accused of?
On January 31st, 2025n, EPT Cypris 2023 Main Event champion from Netherlands Gilles «Ghilley» Simon published on X (ex-Twitter) a screenshot of Nacho Barbero’s story from Instagram.
You can clearly see that on the background of four tables on ACR Poker with a hero player nicknamed TRAVISRICE Nacho has an opened GTO Wizard — a solver that is prohibited to use during active sessions on Winning Poker Network because it gives unfair advantage as a real-time assistant (RTA).
Gilles asked in his tweet: “Yooo @ACR_POKER. Can we use GTOWizard while playing on your site?” and received a peculiar answers from Nacho himself:
His tweets confused other players a lot, so Jay Farber pointed Nacho to the absurdity of them — and got another cryptic response.
For that James Walsh added a screenshot from SharkScope where you can clearly see that on January 31st four tournaments from Nacho’s story are the only MTTs TRAVISRICE played on this day.
This information Nacho decided not to comment on and just moved on from discussions. ACR Poker PR team came instead but didn’t help to calm the poker community at all.
How Did The WPN PR Team Respond To Nacho’s Screenshot?
On the same day Winning Poker Network chose a very creative way to address players’ concerns: via ACR Poker on X they published a post with restricted comments where they called their ambassador “goofball” and “not a GTO-style player”.
This response shocked poker players even more than Nacho’s did. So, they used an opportunity to quote it with their comments — we chose a few of them as examples:
Joey Tutone: Just the facts please:
Nacho: I was teaching my horses GTO and not cheating.
ACR: Nacho is a goofball and does not play GTO (turns comments off)
Gary Blackwood: I honestly thought that getting two players who have never played online cash in their LIVES to lecture us on the safety of their bot infested online cash games was un-toppable levels of shithousery from the ACR public relations team but HERE WE FUCKIN ARE. (Gary references the $100,000 RTA Challenge that was announced by WPN after the botfarm scandal in 2023. In this challenge, WPN encouraged players to make their own bots to test the ACR Poker security system but then canceled it after an overwhelming critique from the community).
Beriuzy: Is this seriously the best you can come up with?
Hehehehe he’s a clown hehheeheheheh.
Guys im also a clown, gonna make 7 accounts & collude against 1 dude but hehehehe im a goofball with monkeys so it’s ok!
Acr, i always bash you because you are simply unproffesional when it comes to customer relations. I have documented it so many times here on X.
I respect & love your great MTTs but PLEASEA INVEST IN YOUR PUBLIC RELATIONS.
Regarding your silly post.
It doesn’t matter if he’s not a GTO player.
Wizard AI solver allows ANYONE to solve even the weirdest non-GTO spots with custom inputs/ranges.
I am not saying Nacho did that but for fuck’s sake, dont defend his mistake & encourage others to follow suit.
Following Response From ACR Poker PR Team
After a few days of the poker community criticising, scolding and even mocking the first response from WPN, on February 2nd its team finally tweeted a more serious reaction to the situation:
It didn’t make poker players happy but at least they thawed slightly toward WPN. However, the overly formal and watery response ultimately contributed to people doubting the objectivity of the potential investigation.
Strange Defense For Nacho From Patrick Leonard & Dominik Nitsche
While the majority of the poker community was confused and dissatisfied with responses from accused and related parties, a few well-known professional poker players stood up for Nacho. And it resonated with others but not in a good way because of wording and accentuation.
Patrick Leonard: No point arguing about that
Pads was among the first respected players who responded to this situation on X:
Obviously all of nachos friends (including me) will defend him, the haters will hate. Nobody will actually know so no point arguing about that. The unarguable has to be that GTOW needs to have a delay, it’s needed a delay for so long but surely it needs to happen before wsop this summer. I didn’t fire any wsop online last year and don’t play the venom, I literally love online poker and tournaments more than 99% of people. If I won’t play because of GTOW imagine how many hundreds/thousands don’t play because of it?
Btw if somebody cheats, they don’t play in chips.
His response, however, didn’t calm players but caused discontent among other well-known pros. For example, Lex Veldhuis found the wording not good at all and asked Patrick:
The haters will hate’ is such a wild statement to waive away people thinking about this critically.
And then ‘no point arguing’? Come on man seriously.
Patrick answered him in detail:
People will always say your colleagues run cheating stables without evidence, people close to them will always say they’re good guys. People will defend them and haters will jump on because that’s what people like to do on social media. Arguing on Twitter about it or sticking up for it helps 0 for you, your colleagues, stars or anybody else. I imagine less than 1% of people change their minds based on a Twitter thread. Finding methods against catching stables >>>>arguing on Twitter.
Obviously nacho is dumb for doing what he did, obviously acr responded insanely. Everybody will make their mind up about it and nobody will change their mind based on a social media argument.
I agree with you though I could have worded it differently, on both counts. Thanks for saying and I agree! Language used is crucial, especially in areas people will be sensitive AND are being stolen/cheated from. You’re right.
FWIW I have nacho’s gtowizard history from the last 48 hours and I’m spending the time going over it and compiling the data, I’d rather defend him this way than “trust me bros he wouldn’t do this”.
So yeah I think no point arguing and haters will hate and nacho is v v v silly for this acr handled it v v v bad
Lex stated that Patrik didn’t quite understand him:
The problem with what you said is that it immediately skips the step of scrutiny and pressure on ACR to do a deep dive. I agree arguing on Twitter doesn’t yield great results in swaying opinion, but there is definitely value in it being an active, talked about topic. Just bypassing severity and deeming it pointless helps absolutely no one except for Nacho.
The next player who was unsatisfied with Leonard’s line of “defense” was Rayan “Beriuzy” Chamas:
Why are we defending him? He fucked up.
He did a mistake, he shouldn’t use GTOW & that’s it. We can forgive him but please do not defend him. That gives the okay to bad actors to feel fine doing it all the time.
I am CERTAIN he did not RTA or Cheat fyi but do not sugarcoat it.
Patrick answered him by shifting attention from Barbero’s actions to more serious problems in his opinion:
Like I said there’s no point defending him one way or the other. I’m talking about the severity of the issues
– gtow being accessible as a real time cheating tool >>
– sites partnering with them even though they knowingly do ^^ >>
– acr communication and actions after what happened here >>
– nacho having it open
Everybody will focus and hate on point 4 but the stuff above is the main issue. It should not be possible to do what he’s being accused of doing.
Obviously the comms etc all around it is absolutley absurd but I don’t play there anyway (because of this issue) so not bothered at all about that. I likely play on the site 2-4x a year maximum, I understand why you’d care alot more about that but for me it isn’t triggering.
Beriuzy added that he has no issues with Barbero but thinks that “the main issue is ACR defending him & Nacho pretending it’s not a big deal. Sure he made a mistake, apologize & move on but dont fkn 🤡 us”.
Dominik Nitsche: Bans for what Nacho allegedly did = 0 fish left on any site
While Pads tried to explain why problem of using solvers during online poker sessions is deeper than just “Nacho broke the rules”, Dominik Nitsche chose much more creative line of “defense”:
The truth is that if people got banned for what nacho allegedly did there’d be 0 fish left on any site.
Fish love looking at gtowiz while donating at the tables.
Yes it’s mainly the fish who cheat but they still suck
Anyway a lot of people here accusing @nacho_barbero of the worst for having a preflop range up are either entirely clueless or outright malicious.
The man has 4 tables up. He’s not in some unique river solve executing a perfectly balanced strategy in real time.
Also if this shit scares you the best time to stop playing online poker isn’t now. It was about 20 years ago.
So grow up. He’s not playing perfectly because of what’s in his background. And I’m sure a bunch of the accusers know this too but they just want to talk shit.
These responses confused players even more than Barbero’s statements, so some of them — including Eric Zheng, Andrew George, Derek Kwan — asked Nitsche to provide the source of his conclusions. He reinforced them with more subjective points, such as “My definition of fish might be different to yours”, “Fish buy all the training material”, and “Even the recs try to play well”.
No wonder that players didn’t want to dive deep into discussions with him after that, especially remembering the recent Main Event 2024 WSOP scandal with solver where Dominik was involved.
How Did This Story End For Nacho Barbero?
WPN conducted an investigation of “all hands played in the tournaments Nacho participated in” and found him not guilty of cheating and using RTA “to aid his or any other player’s decision-making during live hands”. They shared final conclusions in another tweet on February 3rd.
Then on February 4th Patrick Leonard posted a video with his own review of over 1,3K of Nacho’s hands from GTOW history and found him not guilty too.
As a cherry on top, Nacho Barbero posted “an official” response to them in the form of two screenshots with text.
Interestingly, all these responses and investigations ignore Nacho’s first statement “i was coaching 4 of my horses on a discord call. i dont play online, they dont have the gto wizard pro so i was looking at some spots for them”.
In the end, allegedly objective investigations were done but some questions still remain unaddressed:
- Why is the fact of using GTO Wizard during an online poker session not enough to punish any player, but ambassador especially, for breaking the rules of your own network?
- Why did Nacho initially tell the story about horses and him not playing online poker if later he and ACR revealed that he not only played online but even managed to reach Day 2 of the Venom?
- Why solving hands for others via Discord while they are playing online poker isn’t RTA if it is an assistance in real time by definition?
Will we ever get clear answers to these questions? We want to believe but it is hard.