Nuevo Vallarta LAPT Event cancelled

With the second event of the LAPT season in full swing at the Marival Grand and Club Suites, the unexpected happened.
Tournament Director, Mike Ward called an unscheduled stop, after which the players were called to leave their tables and to head to the ante room. The TV crews and reporters covering the event were also cleared from the game room.

Play had been in swing for a while and only 89 of the 242 players were left in contention when the unscheduled break was announced.
The action had been rather upbeat with Victor Ramdin and Greg Raymer atop the provisional leader-board.
Alex Brenes, Ryan Fee, and Maria Mayrinck were also among the survivors.

4 hours after the break was announced, it was still unclear what had happened. Tournament director Mike Ward filled in the remaining field after midnight about the apparent causes of the incident. Mexican authorities, who kept watch for 10 hours of play, eventually decided to rescind the license of the Mexican partner of the LAPT responsible for the organization of the event.

LAPT officials engaged into negotiations with the government in order to gain allowance for the remainder of the tournament to go ahead as planned. Ward told players to return on Saturday for a possible chance to continue the action, however not long ago news broke that after a day of negotiations and deliberations, the tournament has in fact been altogether cancelled.

The $2,500 buy-in event attracted 242 participants. The 89 players who remained standing at the time of the cancellation will share the prize-pool the following way: everyone will get $5,000 out of the prize-pool, and the remainder of the money will be distributed among those who finished the highest up on the provisional chip leader board.
The only problem is, because the Marival Resorts and Suites has been locked down, the chip-count cannot possibly be accurately determined, so prizes are likely to be distributed on an estimated basis.

Although the Mexican gaming authorities’ decision may come as surprise to many, those who are familiar with the ambiguous nature of Mexican legislation regarding live poker, know that something like this is always in the books whenever a live tournament is held on Mexican soil.
The murkiness of the affair will probably mean that no clear conclusion will be drawn from the LAPT incident in regards to the future of live poker in Mexico.

One thing seems to be quite certain though: anyone who plans to hold a poker tourney in Mexico will think twice about whether or not to go ahead with it in the future.

In a short statement, the LAPT has confirmed the cancellation of its Nuevo Vallarta event, and re-iterated the fact that is had fully cooperated with the Mexican authorities all through the event. According to the LAPT statement, the cancellation of the event was a direct consequence of the suspension of the Mexican partner which had obtained the ruling needed to organize the tournament from Mexico’s Ministry of Interior.