Home / Poker News January 2013 / The Worst Poker Moments of 2012 – Epic Poker Fiasco
The Worst Poker Moments of 2012 – Epic Poker Fiasco
Posted by: Randy Williams - Thu, 2013-01-03 06:04
Without a doubt, one of the biggest disappointments and thus lowest points of 2012 was the Epic Poker League’s failure to make good on its promise and actually have its $1 million guaranteed freeroll, and that is just at first glance. At a closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the Epic Poker fiasco was only second to the Full Tilt Poker affair. There were several striking similarities between the two incidents. Headed by Annie Duke (Howard Lederer’s sister) and WSOP commissioner Jeffrey Pollack, Federated Sports + Gaming, the company behind the Epic Poker League, stirred up quite a bit of skepticism upon its inception. It was unclear to most experts how the company/organization would make ends meet, given the enormous costs of the venture and the massive added cash promised.
The community was obviously excited about the possibility of playing in a series of 4 rake-free live events, each of which offered massive prize-pools and featured buy-ins of $20k. Indeed, the EPL was supposed to look like a series of high roller
poker tournaments, but eventually, of the 4 scheduled events only 3 took place. Federated Sports + Gaming filed for Chapter 11 and thus neither the 4th event of the series, nor the promised $1 million freeroll (which was probably the very reason why players decided to take part in the Series in the first place) were dropped. Naturally, the
poker community was quite livid about the way the EPL turned out. The anger was amplified by the numerous similarities between the EPL meltdown and the Full Tilt Poker fiasco. Upon calling it quits, the company had liabilities totaling close to $7.8 million, and assets of about $200k – something that the Full Tilt Folks do indeed know quite a bit about. Annie Duke and the other executives walked away with about $1.1 million too.
