Now Let’s Move On

By now we have all heard about the Daniel Negreanu controversy involving the No-Limit Hold’em Shootout event. In a nutshell, here’s what happened. Figuring that it was going to start nine- or ten-handed, Daniel caught up on some much needed sleep and arrived an hour late to the tournament, only to discover that his table had started short-handed and David Singer had wiped out all the other players at the table.

When he found out how the format had suddenly changed at the last second, Daniel voiced a complaint and demanded that he receive his money back, threatening to boycott the rest of the Series if his demand wasn’t satisfied. The result?

“They did all they could do at this point, which is to refund my money,” Daniel told me earlier this evening. “That was the least of which I would want. There was no way I was going to play any more tournaments if they hadn’t refunded me for a tournament I never really signed up for. But they apologized for it. The mistake was made by one of the floor staff. Frankly, the floor staff this year is weaker than it’s ever been at the World Series of Poker. There are some good floor men but there are some that are completely incompetent making decisions and they’re in a position they shouldn’t be.”

It would have been very surprising if Daniel hadn’t won his appeal. The story circulating around the Rio was that David Singer had to sit at the table and wait while Daniel’s stack was blinded off. If this was the case, Daniel’s argument would have lost some of its strength. What actually happened was that a floor person came and cleared the table of all the stacks, leaving only one. The problem was the he removed the wrong stacks and the one he left belonged to the wrong person.

According to David Singer who was sitting at the table at the time, “They pulled the stacks off the table and left one. It didn’t even belong to Daniel. It belonged to some guy called Lindsay.”

Just one more example of the poor decision-making coming from the floor this year. Let’s hope it’s the last instance of such malfeasance. And now it’s time to move on.