We worked with Donald Manns from September 2024 until April 2026.
At the 2025 WSOP Donald told us he had “misplaced” $6,362.88.
He claimed that the $6.3k must have fallen out of his backpack. Our working theory is that he used our funds to cover the travel expenses including lodging and meals. We got some reports from other players that whenever they saw him at WSOP he’d always be getting a poker-table massage (something he mentioned as a ‘leak’ of his as well).
At that time, he said he wished he had the money available so he would not have had to tell us about the loss in the first place.
We decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and added the missing amount to makeup instead of forcing immediate repayment. We made it very clear that this was a one-time exception.
In September 2025, he told us that his father was diagnosed with cancer and that he “trying to take it slow and not get too deep in makeup by forcing sessions when I’m not at my peak performance.”
We responded by recommending that he stop playing poker for the time being and return the funds he had until such time that he can focus again. Donald then claimed that he wasn’t being affected and would let us know if that changed.
We decided to continue. Over the next few months his results deteriorated and even though he confirmed that he wasn’t working on improving his game in any way he told us in late January 2026: “I’m honestly not worried and you guys shouldn’t be either.”
On March 2nd, Donald asked us for funds to deposit on global and WPN. We sent him funds on WPN, but somehow missed the reload for global. He didn’t follow up with us about that reload until March 28th.
We asked him to use funds that he already had on hand. When we followed up a few of days later on April 7th whether he had deposited onto global he said: “I did not, I didn’t see that till this morning and would rather prioritize the live events until this weekend. Global is dying too sadly. Constant overlays, lowering gtds, dropping dailies and they shut down twitch channel. Wasn’t in a rush to deposit that 800 from live funds.”
Given that he had a prior history of misplacing funds we found this highly suspicious and asked him to immediately return the $855 he had on hand in cash plus $500 he had on WPN.
The timing of the request was inconvenient because the $155 tournament had started around two minutes earlier. However, since Donald usually registered this event one to two hours late, we decided to still proceed with the request.
A few minutes later, he became very emotional and blamed us for making everything hard on him. He said: “I’m already here. I’m just playing on my own. You guys have made this incredibly tough, when I’m already in incredibly tough times”
By April 13th we still hadn’t received the funds. When asked for an explanation he said: “I will send asap. My dad’s dying and I’m caretaking 24/7 . My GMA just flew in. My cars in my garage not started for last 3 weeks.”
It wasn’t clear how these things didn’t impact him going to play live tournaments, but did impact him paying us back.
Eventually he returned the funds on April 15th.
On April 17th we had a call with Donald Manns, where we communicated that we couldn’t continue working with him as trust had been eroded too far. Given that the $6,362.88 that was “misplaced” at the WSOP in 2025 we expected him to still pay this back as it wasn’t really makeup. Knowing he was in a bad financial and life situation we gave him until April 24th to come up with a plan that he’d think was workable in his situation.
When we followed up on April 24th Donald became very emotional, again blamed us for making things hard on him and did not initially provide a clear timeline for starting to return the funds.
Because he failed to come up with any sort of repayment plan we asked for $100 on May 1st with $100/month after that.
On May 1st we hadn’t received the $100. He said he didn’t have it, and it wasn’t realistic.
We then asked him for $10 as a sign of good faith, his response to this was: “No I can’t, I need at least a month to find a way to make this work and get caught up.”
He then offered to send us $50 on June 1st and $50/month after that.
We said that’d be acceptable but in the meantime we’d need to make a post saying: “We’re having an issue with Donald Manns, he’s working on resolving it, but we just wanted to document that there is an active issue.”
We felt obligated to make this post because Donald Manns told us he’d be actively seeking backing and staking from other people telling them that “I have been backed for the last 7 years and never a single issue with money”. Which is blatantly false.
He refused even this compromise.
Given that Donald Manns refused even a $10 payment, combined with the history of missing funds and delayed fund returns.
We believe his intention is not to repay the missing funds and that the community needs to be made aware of this situation since he’s actively going to be seeking backing and staking from others.