Mike Matusow revealed this week that he sold more than 300 Bitcoin back in 2012, which would be worth more than $23,000,000 at today’s prices. Although ‘Mike The Mouth’ thought he missed out on $186,000,000 of cryptocurrency value.
The incredible claims came during an interesting poker panel show called ‘The Orbit’, dedicated to poker’s Black Friday and airing exactly a decade after online poker came to a shocking halt.
Matusow’s Full Tilt disaster
Matusow was a Full Tilt pro at the time and says he “can’t believe it’s been 10 years,” adding, “I think about the scars every day. To me, it seems like yesterday.”
Matusow’s career nosedived when Full Tilt crashed following the dreadful day of April 15th 2011 – the FBI unsealing an indictment against Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and the Cereus Poker Network that owned Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet.
Mike had $400k sitting on his Full Tilt account and would have been expecting much more as a sponsored pro, raking in at least $600k per year, but he was left broke when it turns out that the site had not been segregating players funds.
Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel, and John Juanda come in for heavy criticism in Matusow’s ‘Orbit’ appearance, describing them as “motherfuckers” who “took tremendous advantage of me.”
“I trusted them, and I believed what they had to say and that they had my best interests. As it turns out they really didn’t,” bemoans Mike, who says his biggest mistake was “not going with PokerStars.”
It’s far from the first time Mike has lashed out at his fellow Full Tilt pros, Seidel coming in for criticism a couple of years ago…
You got 60m from full tilt as 1 of biggest owners while others took fall and are struggling I'm sure you will live! https://t.co/hlbJQ2xMUE
— Mike Matusow (@themouthmatusow) October 26, 2018
…and he has several times attacked Howard Lederer for his role, claiming ‘The Professor’ had “lied to my face” about funds.
Mike’s $multimillion Bitcoin mishap
As costly and painful as the Full Tilt debacle was for Matusow, the following year was infinitely more expensive, Mike selling Bitcoin for a tiny fraction of what it is worth nowadays.
With the then-emerging virtual currency worth $27 per coin, Matusow apparently had several hundred bitcoin. But he says that he sold them because he was worried he’d be involved in “another” Ponzi scheme.
“Anyway that $10,000 in bitcoin would be worth $186 million today,” stated Mike, although as pointed out by PokerNews the sums don’t add up, the true total closer to $23million.
Mike, however, thinks it may have been a blessing in disguise, admitting: “Who knows what I would do if I were to have had $100m maybe I’d have gone back to doing drugs. I might have ended up dead!”
Perhaps it also saved the poker community from witnessing this scene, Mike tweeting out last month about the highs and lows of cryptocurrency…
“Now I have respect for money,” claims Mike, explaining: “$1,000 used to be like a $1 to me. But now I wonder how I was ever like that; I wonder how I could live like that. $1,000 feels like a lot to me now and that’s made me a better person.”
You can catch the full panel discussion covering Black Friday on The Orbit show today on TwitchTV.
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