Following the successful recovery of the $10,000 NAPT Las Vegas Gold Pass, PokerOrg's internal team and a group of private investigators worked together to produce a report for law enforcement agencies at the local, federal, and international levels. While our team is not privy to information in the law enforcement investigation, we are releasing our full report unredacted. To go back and follow the search as it happens, you can see all of the reporting here: CodeOrg Live Updates. We hope this transparency helps rebuild trust with everyone in The Org. Once again, our deepest thanks to The Org search team and the eventual hero, David Lappin. -- Brad Willis, Editor-In-Chief
Executive Summary
In the fall of 2024, poker industry media outlet PokerOrg planned to reprise its 2022 Runner Runner competition and award a $10,000 reward package to the winner of the planned event. In the days before PokerOrg went public with the competition, the reward money and the subject of the Runner Runner competition disappeared at the same time. Subsequently, PokerOrg received messages claiming to be from a group called BLOCKERS. Those messages claimed responsibility for the heist and forced PokerOrg and its membership group ,The Org, into a two-week cat and mouse game that many people believed was an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). BLOCKERS announced searchers would need to find eight numbers to determine the location of the Gold Pass. To find those numbers, the PokerOrg staffers and independent searchers waded through a miasma of social media sites and internet mazes for fourteen days before one of the lead searchers, David Lappin of Ireland, led Winslow Arizona police to the location of the Gold Pass. Upon arriving at the corner along the famed Route 66, police found Slow Poker, an internet content creator, in the possession of the Gold Pass. In a video posted to the BLOCKERS X account, that creator claimed responsibility for the entire ruse, awarded the Gold Pass to Lappin, and ultimately vanished again, promising to reappear soon so he can be chased again. Lappin wrote an article explaining his methods to solving the problems that led to the pass.
CodeOrg: The Answers
For the sake of brevity, we begin with the answer the search team sought for two weeks. BLOCKERS initially did not tell searchers what they would need to be successful. Random clues seemed to lead nowhere or to answers that didn't initially compute. Eventually, however, keen searchers realized their efforts had not been in vain, as clues would finally lead to a set of eight numbers. BLOCKERS later revealed those numbers to be a set of latitude and longitude coordinates at an exact spot on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Perhaps the most frustrating thing for the search team: even once they had all eight numbers, they were forced to determine how to order the numbers in the set. Ultimately, Lappin revealed the answer to be:
35° 1' 24.6" N 110° 41' 53.16" W
This location, made famous by the hit 1970s song "Take it Easy" ultimately proved to be correct and where Winslow Police found Slow Poker.
Every clue revealed
In the course of the investigation, the forensics team uncovered a video left on a BLOCKERS server. It is believed BLOCKERS/Slow Poker intended to use this video to mock searchers but ran out of time. We have confirmed the authenticity of the video and the clues within it, but we are unsure what to make of the last frame.
This concludes the first phase of the investigation. More information will follow when warranted.
