Even though the WPT, which took place at the Wynn Las Vegas, has been over for a few days now and all the trophies have met their owner, one situation has caused controversy among poker fans and players alike.
It all took place during the final table of the biggest freeroll ever held in poker. The ClubWPT Gold $5M Invitational Freeroll guaranteed a total prizepool of $5,000,000, with $1,000,000 awaiting the winner. In addition, the WPT decided to enhance the tournament with Mystery Bounty envelopes, which also hid amounts such as $200,000, $50,000 and $25,000.
These envelopes were opened by players at the final table and the biggest one, worth $200,000, was pulled out by Daniyal Gheba, who eventually finished in third place with a prize of another $125,000.
Inappropriate trolling?
We, however, will be interested in the name of Jason Christopher in today's article, who also sat at the final table and also collected his bounty envelope for eliminating a player. As he was pulling the card out of the envelope, the zeros and decimal point were gradually showing up, and so Jason was beginning to rejoice in the fact that he had won $50,000.
However, the organizers decided to place a $000,000 prize among the envelopes, and to Jason's misfortune, he pulled that very envelope. His sadness and disappointment were obvious, but the commentators were having a great time at the whole situation.
The WPT, of course, made the whole situation public on their social media, where they added the following caption to the video, " Congratulations to Jason Christopher for winning back his buy-in!"
*you can watch the full video of the situation by clicking on the image
What followed in the comments was probably not what the WPT was expecting. An avalanche of negative comments were unleashed on their actions and most players didn't find it funny at all. People in the comments pointed out that Jason was embarrassed and humiliated by the WPT in front of the whole world. Commenters didn't even indulge in swearing at the WPT, and expressed the opinion that the idea was absolutely wrong, cruel, stupid or sick. Some of the world's poker sites also expressed their negative opinions about the WPT after the situation.
Jason started the final table from seventh place and eventually managed to fight his way through to the final heads-up where he had a $1,000,000 bounty on his hands that could have patched up the previous embarrassing situation. Unfortunately, after his initial bad luck, when he drew a zero bounty, Jason Christopher had to settle for "only" $250,000 for second place after a single hand in heads-up play.
Poker can sometimes be cruel enough without even more cruel games being played with players by the organizers, and this is doubly true when it's such a huge brand as the WPT. Jason's disappointed facial expression should be an example that such trolling of players should have no place in poker. Even though the tournament was a freeroll, none of us have any idea what kind of life situations the players sitting at the table have.
On a final note, zero envelopes tend to be included in Mystery Bounty tournaments, but they are marked as $0 in the envelope, and so it is immediately clear to the player that he has won nothing. However, in most of these cases, when the zero envelope is drawn, there is the possibility of a redraw, where the player will already receive some prize money.
Source - wpt, youtube, twitter (x)
