The big story at the WSOP this week happened at the final table of the Millionaire Maker, a $1,500 buy-in event that had 11,996 entries.
It was one of several WSOP events that qualified for ClubWPT Gold's Gold Rush promotion. ClubWPT Gold has been giving out Gold Rush tickets as part of a big promotion this summer, and if you have one and win one of the advertised tournaments, you get a $1 million bonus on top.
It seems great on the surface. It’s free money for players, while ClubWPT Gold gets to hitch its wagon to the WSOP circus and grab some publicity.
But $1 million is a lot of money — multiples more than the first-place prize money for some of the events — and a lot of people predicted that this was a grenade that had been intentionally thrown by ClubWPT Gold to cause issues, and create headlines.
If that was the aim, it was achieved last week.
Lavin: ‘It was breaking my brain… I played different’
Michael Lavin was the first player to land the $1 million bonus when he won the $1,500 WSOP Shootout event.
That event went off without any hint of trouble, but it’s fair to say the final table dynamics of the WSOP event were changed completely by the $1 million bonus. First place money in this event was $267,673 and second was $178,240. There wasn’t even $1 million up for grabs on the entire final table.
We talked to Lavin afterwards and he said, “It made the whole tournament so weird for me… I had to play completely different. It was breaking my brain."
It worked out for him, but the final table may have played out very differently without the bonus.
Lightning strikes twice
Fast forward to the Millionaire Maker and things did go down very differently. Jesse Yaginuma was the player who had the $1 million Gold Rush ticket, but he had a huge chip deficit when heads-up started — 30,700,000 chips to James Carroll’s 269,300,000.
Over the course of the next 90 minutes, Yaginuma made a comeback and won, but play was flagged as suspicious by players on social media. We spoke with Yaginuma afterwards and he denied any deal had been made to let him win.
It didn’t take long for the WSOP to act. It announced an investigation at 8am the next morning, and said it had withheld the first and second place prize money and the bracelet. As of the time of this article's publication we’re still waiting for an official decision.
That’s the situation. And everyone in poker has an opinion about what should happen. We’re going to break these down to show that things aren’t maybe as easy for the WSOP as some people think.
What is the WSOP investigating?
Chip dumping. The suspicion is that the two players did a deal and that Carroll deliberately threw his shot at a bracelet for a part of the $1 million bonus.
It’s worth pointing out that since the WSOP sale to GGPoker last year, there are two interested parties here – the WSOP and Caesars. The WSOP is played on Caesars’ properties and Caesars hold the license. A decision won’t be announced until everyone’s satisfied.
What’s the problem?
The WSOP does not facilitate chops like some other tours. Players have to win a bracelet and the WSOP builds its brand around them being a meaningful prize. It doesn’t want them to become a commodity that could be ‘bought’ in a heads-up or even wider situation, with players dumping chips to throw the first place for a financial incentive.
A lot of players made the point that ACR ambassador Jeff Boski posted on X. “Allow the facilitation of deals like every other poker venue and this wouldn’t be a problem. The players fund the entire prizepool and pay the ever increasing rake.”
That might be a desirable move for players but it wouldn’t have stopped this situation happening. On the European Poker Tour, any deal that is facilitated has to leave a substantial sum of money and the trophy to play for. Even if the WSOP did the same it would still have left players in the same position – Yaginuma had to win to get the bonus.
What could the WSOP do?
There are a wide range of options open to the WSOP.
1. It could award the bracelet to Yaginuma and pay out the money as advertised. This feels extremely unlikely. If the WSOP ignores the issue, it could easily happen again. (Many players have already pointed out that similar ‘handshake chops’ have happened in the past. This one was just more high profile.)
2. It could do the above but issue a statement to say the rules weren’t as clear as they could be, and that in the future, players will be subject to disqualification.
3. It could pay the players the money and withhold the bracelet and Player of the Year points. But this doesn’t address the issue happening again. Is withholding a bracelet a deterrent? It doesn’t seem that it is.
4. It could pay the players the money and withhold the bracelet and Player of the Year points, AND suspend them from the WSOP for a period of time, say 15 months, which would see them miss next summer’s series. That would be a deterrent.
5. It could disqualify one or both players and redistribute the prize money and withhold the bracelet. Some high-profile players have already made it clear what they would do if the WSOP went down this route.
This also opens up the possibility of the affected players taking a legal route to reclaim their winnings. Can you collude with someone if there’s no one to collude against? You can chip dump, and that is against the rules.
Rule 76 of the WSOP states: “Poker is an individual game. Soft play will result in penalties that may include forfeiture of chips and/or disqualification. Chip dumping will result in disqualification.”
Integrity of the game — what do the players think?
Many high-profile players like Matt Berkey and Patrick Leonard have dismissed any game integrity issues as negligible beyond the two players that may have discussed a deal heads-up.
Leonard said, “Please stop talking about the integrity. The tournament was over, deals happen all the time. Not a single participant was affected AT ALL.”
Berkey said, “Not paying them would be the dumbest PR move imaginable. This is hardly the first time in WSOP history a chop has been privately facilitated in this manner & not paying is just a spiteful attempt at saving face from the embarrassment brought on by the WPT freeroll.”
Optics are terrible for the game
Not all players think the same, though.
In a series of posts on X, Felipe Ramos said, “I guess it’s just me disgusted by this WSOP HU +1M bonus debate.. . Poker will never be recognized as BIGTIME sport/game or gather +popularity if this is ‘OK’. If you chip dump/collude, in whatever scenario, your values are negotiable. RULES EXIST FOR A REASON.”
He went on to say that he “couldn’t care less about the deal. But I care about the game and this is terrible for the game.”
Nate Silver, co-host of the Risky Business podcast took a similar view.
In an extensive post on X, largely reproduced here, Silver said the following:
“It's terrible for poker's reputation to see this sort of blatant chip-dumping especially at a very high profile livestreamed bracelet event.
It also probably violates various sections (and there are several pertinent sections) of the WSOP rules.
The right move from an ethical standpoint is to call the floor over once it gets heads up, acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation, and get an advanced ruling on what happens if Carroll just concedes.
Then maybe also contact WPT to see if they'll modify the promotion rules somehow.
If neither of those routes are fruitful, then even if you set the ethics aside, as well as the risk to their reputations, they have to recognize that the sort of chip-dumping required to get a player back from a 9:1 chip deficit on a *table where the hole cards are televised* is going to be obvious to the point that they're risking mutual DQ.”
Do integrity issues start before heads-up?
Poker pro Andreas Froehli went further and claimed that game integrity was affected through the whole of the final table, irrespective of whether a deal had been discussed prior to heads-up play or not.
He posted, “Facts: Yaginuma had protection EV$ on the Final Table of the WSOP Milly Maker, strongly altering anyone’s highest EV strategy. If they didn’t realize it this time, next time somebody will.”
He argues that the mere fact of the $1M bounty, winnable only by one player, changes the dynamics for everyone. There are a myriad examples but here’s one: If you think the player would be amenable to a deal, do you decide to try and keep them in the tournament so you can get to heads-up, do a deal and potentially 2x the first-place prize money?
And, with such a high-profile case, if players hadn’t been thinking about these things previously, what happens the next time it rolls onto a final table?
One thing that is probably widely accepted is that the players were put in an almost impossible situation, which has led to Yaginuma and Carroll being dragged into a big scandal on what should have been one of the best nights in their careers.
What should the WSOP have done?
The WSOP could have anticipated this worst-case scenario, and clarified the rules at any final table where a Gold Rush ticket was in play.
You have to think that if it was made clear the WSOP would take a hard line, it would have deterred players from talking about a deal.
But is ClubWPT Gold really to blame?
ClubWPT Gold knew what it was doing. And it will say that it’s giving money to poker players and that any game integrity issues are for the WSOP to deal with. What’s also fairly obvious is that this has caused final tables at the WSOP to play out differently. And the effects aren’t just laser-focused on the two players at the end. The amount of impact this had on other players is up for debate but it’s greater than zero.
2009 Main Event champ Joe Cada posted, “I said this from the start, [that the] ClubWPT promotion opens the door for collusion. I don’t blame the players one bit. The problem lies if it affected 3 handed play. Carroll could play hard against Josh and turn 3 handed into a heads up battle.”
While we’re waiting for the WSOP to reach a decision – and given the depth of opinion and nuance here, we can’t see one that’s going to make everyone happy – we’ll leave the final word to Sam Greenwood who made some brilliant points in his Substack. And no one comes out looking good.
“Everyone is at fault and deserves scorn; in the parlance of this blog, they all punted.”
Greenwood says the ClubWPT Gold promotion was “dumb” and went on to say, “a promotion that pays one player as much as four times first place money opens up a loophole slightly larger than ‘I will wait so I don’t have to pay a BB’... If you design a promotion with such broken incentives that it actively encourages chip dumping, you will see chips get dumped.”
As for the WSOP, Greenwood believes that they should facilitate deals, although acknowledges that “you’d still probably see chip dumping heads-up in an attempt to extract $1,000,000 from ClubWPT... Every serious tournament poker operator in the world allows deals. Why doesn’t the WSOP?”
As for the players, Greenwood says, “in my view, chip dumping heads-up is mildly unethical, assuming the way you got heads-up was fair and square.”
But he goes on to say that “if they chip dumped in a way that was so obvious that they got caught, it is not the fault of ‘Twitter narcs’ for noticing; it’s their fault they didn’t hide it well.”
What happens next?
If you think ClubWPT Gold might pause after seeing what went down, think again.
Instead, it has doubled down on the Gold Rush promotion. In an email sent out to its player base it said, “We’re doubling the number of Gold Rush Tickets awarded in our daily freerolls, with 32 tickets awarded in all open Gold Rush Ticket Freerolls this week.”
Three more WSOP events are eligible for the $1 million bonus — the $300 Gladiator that’s playing at the moment, the $1,000 Mini Main and the $10,000 Main Event.
ClubWPT Gold has achieved exactly what it wanted – hijacking the WSOP for publicity and giving its biggest competitor a black eye in the process. It’s a smart marketing move that is a million miles removed from the traditionally corporate WPT of old.
So far ClubWPT Gold has avoided serious backlash from players. Players love free money, and it’s great for players like Lavin. But should that absolve them of any wider problems?
The WPT has also confirmed that it will pay out the $1 million bonus no matter what the WSOP decides, buying them even more favor.
Meanwhile, the WSOP has confirmed to us that no decision has been made yet. When it comes, the social media firestorm will, no doubt, light up again.
Additional image courtesy of Joe Giron/WPT.
