Home / Poker News December 2012 / The Worst Poker Moments of 2012 – The PPT Fiasco
The Worst Poker Moments of 2012 – The PPT Fiasco
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2012-12-30 06:37
Offering multi-million dollar prize-pools and guaranteeing the winner a 7-figure haul for the last 4 years, the Partouche Poker Tour’s Main Event has become a staple presence on the live
poker tournament calendar of every noteworthy poker pro out there. The event went down in flames in 2012 though, quite possibly a victim of the general downturn the industry has seen in recent years.
The Grand Final of the PPT kicked off in September, and the advertised guarantee was a handsome €5 million. The only problem was that this time around fewer players showed up and coughed up the buy-in than the organizers had anticipated and that caused all sorts of problems. From the buy-ins alone, the organizers could barely cover about 85% of the advertised guarantee.
This didn’t go unnoticed by some of the players and egged on by the relative silence regarding the issue of the guarantee, they began enquiring. The PPT staff was quick to tell them that there had never been a €5 million guarantee: as a matter of fact, no one had ever talked about any sort of guarantee. The PPT was also quick to remove any reference to the above said guarantee from all its web proprieties, however cached versions of the pages remained in the archives of the major internet search engines. Tech-savvy players were quick to pull those cached copies out and dangle them in the faces of the organizers.
The head of the PPT, Patrick Partouche also addressed the issue, at first denying the existence of the guarantee himself. Once the ramshackle nature of the official company line became obvious though, he turned around and added the remaining €700k to the guarantee from his own pockets. Despite that, the tour has been discontinued.
