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PartyPoker Disqualifies Latest WPT500 Winner

Written by Jennifer Newell
Last updated on
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It is never pleasant to strip someone of a title. And more often than not, the person losing the title challenges the issue that prompted the drastic action. In the most recent case of this happening in poker, the three parties are the World Poker Tour, partypoker, and David Afework.

On June 1, Afework won the WPT500 – the second of two WPT500 events in the most recent online collaboration between the WPT and partypoker. Not even one week later, Afework said that partypoker rescinded his title and confiscated all of his winnings from that tournament and even a subsequent winning online roulette session.

PartyPoker won’t reveal any details beyond pointing to its terms and conditions. Afework denies any wrongdoing. And the World Poker Tour has no comment.

What Had Happened Was…

The World Poker Tour and partypoker have been teaming up to run online tournaments since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. In fact, the two entities had been talking prior to that time, but the shutdown of all live poker prompted an expedited path to putting official WPT events online. Over the past 14-15 months, the World Poker Tour has awarded titles in online tournaments on the main tour, as well as for WPTDeepStacks and WPT500.

The most recent series was the WPT Online, which consisted of numerous events, two of which were WPT500 tournaments. The second one  – a $530 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event – brought in 2,088 entries for a prize pool of $1,044,000. The top 312 players cashed in the event, with David Afework of the UK taking home the biggest amount ($160,211) for the win.

By his own account, Afework ran well and captured the biggest poker score of his life to date. He was so excited and confident after the win that he took £2K of his winnings to an online roulette table and ran it up to £18K.

It was a good night for Afework.

Player’s Side

The initial account of what happened next came from Afework. He started a new thread on the Two Plus Two forum entitled “WPT500 Event #24 Winner Disqualified – Help Me.” On June 7, he wrote:

“Hi, my name is David Afework and I recently won $160,000 on partypoker. It was my biggest win ever and the most amazing moment of my life. However today I received an email from partypoker telling me that I have been disqualified because they believe I gave my account to a third party. Which is just complete rubbish.”

He went on to explain that the only person in his presence during any part of the tournament was his girlfriend, who does not understand poker. While he has had a poker playing roommate – thus far unnamed – for about seven months, the two players compete separately. He asserted this would explain any IP similarity.

Afework made the point that his losses of thousands of pounds during the weeks prior to his week didn’t flag anyone at partypoker, but his win did.

He contacted the UK Gambling Commission but wasn’t sure what else to do. Of course, forum posters had a lot of advice for Afework but most focused on hiring an attorney.

A further post in the thread indicated that partypoker claimed it had “conclusive evidence” of the terms of service breach, but partypoker representatives have declined the opportunity to talk with Afework further. “If I did something wrong,” he wrote, “I wouldn’t even pursue this, but I ran like a god and managed to win. I’ll drop everything and publicly apologizes (sic) to partypoker if I hve made some mistake which I am unaware of. I just want to sort this mess out.”

Company Side

While partypoker did not issue a post about it or respond to Afework on the forum, the company did provide a statement to PokerNews:

“We have a dedicated Game Integrity team who use a variety of detection methods to proactively identify accounts that are in breach of our terms and conditions. ‘Real Name’ tables help provide a community feel while reducing anonymity. A real account holder should never give a third party access to their account, as state in our General Terms and Conditions (Section 12).

“If establish reasonable evidence of this happening, we reserve the right to take action on the account in question to maintain a safe and fair playing environment. In situations where we seize money from an account which has infringed our rules and policies, we endeavor to redistribute these funds in a timely manner to all players who were impacted by the actions of the offending account.”

When we contacted the World Poker Tour for a statement, they declined. “This is an internal matter for partypoker and the player.”

Partypoker had to fend off quite a few angry comments on Twitter this week, but their responses always pointed to the terms and conditions. Partypoker clearly does not intend to address Afework specifically or reveal the evidence behind its decision to seize his winnings.

With Afework disqualified, the original second-place finisher, Henning Andre of Sweden, became the new champion. His prize was increased from $108,796 to $160,211. And partypoker ambassador Jaime Staples, who finished in third place for $74,227, received a notice from partypoker that his prize increased to $108,796.

 

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