Poker News Round-up

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Poker News Round-up: Week #31

By Adam Noone, 03/08/2007

Whilst the WSOP was in progress, several other operators were running tournaments elsewhere in Vegas, one of which was the newly formed CEO Poker Tour who were based at the Venetian. Despite facing competition from the World Series and the Bellagio Cup, the CEO tour drew some respectably sized fields of up to 350 runners during their eight event festival. This represented a significant increase on previous events the CEO had run and by the time 234 entrants had signed up to the $2,500 main event on 9th July, organisers might well have been congratulating themselves on their emergence onto the poker scene.

That is until some players realised that the tournament, advertised as a $2,500 + $100 event, was going to pay out a lot less than any of them would have expected with a total prize pool of just $503,100. Disgruntled players confronted tournament staff and it emerged that money had been withheld for reasons that had not been made clear upon registration or during the promotion of the event. The $100 fee was to be given to the Venetian casino as host, and 3% of the $2,500 was to be given to Venetian staff as tips. Nothing too unusual about that part but what wasn’t made clear to players was that another 5% of the $2,500 would be held back as a compulsory donation to a children’s charity of the organisers’ choosing and a further 6% would be kept by the CEO Poker Tour itself.

News of this inevitably broke on the internet and after much condemnation of the CEO organisation, president of the CEO Poker Tour Maria Gomez appeared on the 2+2 forum in an attempt to smooth things over. Despite the general feeling of mistrust towards the CEO tour, there were one or two posts in support of Gomez and some that played down the events at the Venetian when players discovered the truth about the prize pool. Gomez claimed that they always had the players’ best interests at heart and that any elements of the structure that had caused any unhappiness were due to a lack of experience and not anything underhand. Furthermore she claimed that details of the payout structure had always been on full view on their website, and anyone who doubted her might have been disappointed to see exactly that when checking the CEO site.

Whilst the page from the CEO website was showing the full list of deductions, unfortunately for Gomez, not only had one forum member noticed that this page had been temporarily removed for modification, but he also had an old copy that he had downloaded which made no mention of the deductions for charity and the CEO. Suddenly a legion of amateur detectives was sparked into action and what they found has left the CEO Poker Tour with some serious questions to answer.

Predictably enough, previous tournaments that the CEO had hosted at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and Palms in Vegas were looked into. Again there was evidence of money being withheld from the prize pools. In one example from the Taj Mahal series in May this year a $5,000 + $200 event with 45 runners generated a pool of only $155,200.

Maria Gomez again posted on the 2+2 forum in an attempt to calm the storm that was brewing around her and fellow executive William Peraza. Again there were subsequent posts in support of her, but after a little investigation it turns out that they were coming from the same IP address as Gomez was using. That in turn led to further evidence of multi-accounting and several different newly opened accounts using the same address were unearthed that had previously either posted favourably about Gomez or the CEO tour, or had made efforts to dissuade players from entering WSOP events and opt for smaller field tournaments instead.

Gomez has not dared to make a re-appearance since, and the Poker Players’ Alliance has now severed all ties with the CEO Poker Tour. There had been no financial ties between the two organisations but the CEO had agreed to distribute PPA lapel pins at its events to raise awareness of the alliance in a bid to get more members signed up. PPA president Michael Bolcerek has released a statement in which he states that the board (which includes Greg Raymer) have decided to sever all ties with CEO Poker.

So what does the future hold for the CEO Poker Tour? According to their website there is an event at Caesar’s Palace in November sponsored by High Limit magazine. Not many people seem to have heard of High Limit magazine, despite the fact that it claims to have a circulation of over 100,000 on its own website where, incidentally, it is touting for ad sales. Some of the more curious types who might have expected to be aware of such a publication decided to check it out and have reported that all six of the listed writing team seem to have exactly the same writing style, making the same errors with grammar and punctuation. To the suspicious reader it might almost in fact seem that they were all just one person and the whole concept of High Limit magazine were just a farce designed to generate money from unsuspecting advertisers. Those of you unfortunate enough to not be on High Limit’s extensive distribution list are sadly now unable to view these articles as they have been removed from the site in the past few days.

As a side note, the children’s charity KidInvest (set up by Gomez and Peraza) also seems to be suffering from technical difficulties as their website is no longer accessible.

Caesar’s Palace dealers that have been drafted in for the 26th November event might be advised to take a good book with them just in case.

On a more positive note, at least from an American player’s point of view, Neteller has now begun the process of returning the millions of dollars which had been frozen since January pending federal investigations. Money is already back in the private bank accounts of some players, although it’s not such great news for non – US Neteller customers as the website is likely to be overloaded with users for several days.

In a move that has surprised no-one, Roy Houghton was announced this week as the tournament director for the National Poker League’s inaugural UK Open starting on August 12th. The NPL is will be an international tournament tour and after kicking events off at Roy’s Loose Cannon club in London, it will move on to the French Open, Asian Open and then the Las Vegas Open to be held at the Venetian. There will be five no limit hold’em events in the festival, with live satellites being held in the club every Wednesday.

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