WSOP.com Online Player of the Year leader alleges mistreatment, unjustified account ban by site management

Mike Holtz, an online poker pro who puts in a ton of volume, wrote the following in a Facebook poker group:

Quote:

---

As some of you know I’m the current WSOP online player of the year. I’m currently up well north of 150k since January. On Monday I logged into my account and saw it was temporaril my disabled. I checked my ceasers rewards account which is well on the way to seven stars this year (connected to my wsop account) and it was also deactivated.

I called wsop they could give me no answers and assured me I would get a call within 72 hours to get to the bottom of this.

My next step was to go to caesars palace where after 10 min of waiting I was escorted off property by security. Two days of phone calls, handwritten letters and emails and I was finally promised a phone call from Danielle Barille over at caesars/wsop.

Today (Friday 4 days after my ban I receive the call) I was informed that because I withdrew several amounts in February under 10k that my account was now frozen until I provided tax returns from the last two years, even tho the vast majority of my wins are in 2021. I have several withdrawals north of 10k including two above 35k. All my recent withdrawals have been 13k+.

They demanded I send them my last two years of tax forms which I did immediately but they won’t give me an answer till next week.
The whole thing is absurd, has anyone heard of this happening? They removed me from player of the year and the circuit leaderboard as well. I’m just at a loss for words

TLDR: wsop player of the year banned for taking too much $ out of my account, losing valuable time on the leaderboard

---

We're going to have him on radio tonight.

This is an interesting situation. The reason WSOP.com was concerned that he withdrew "several amounts under 10k" was because of federal structuring laws. "Structuring" is a crime where one does cash transactions specifically in a way to avoid the $10k+ reporting requirement to the IRS.

Holtz claims that he has several withdrawals above 10k in 2021, including one for as much as 35k, so this concern on their part is unjustified.

I will ask Holtz if he withdrew these sub-10k amounts in cash at the cage, or if he did it via EFT or other electronic transfer. If it wasn't in physical cash, I don't even understand WSOP's concern, because the reporting requirement only applies to physical cash.

He is especially pissed because he's currently the WSOP Online Player of the Year, and is afraid that the time to sort this out will allow someone else to pass him. The online player of the year wins various prizes, including $10k cash, online tournament entries, and a special ring.

If I had to guess he was doing a bunch of cash outs between 9-10K at the cage at Ceasers or another property. This is kind of a natural thing to do if he has a large balance and lives relatively close to the strip. Surely he had no bad intentions. That seemed like a reasonable way to slowly cashout his balance.

It is really fucked up. This could be just one pencil pusher who noticed him coming in one day and then just saw a bunch of cashouts around that general number. The right thing to do would be to just tell him going forward he would have to either make more cashouts over the 10K threshold or provide documentation.

All of his cashouts go through an approval process before they would be made available at the cage. They could of handled this in so many better ways. They could of just bounced back a cashout and instructed him to resubmit at a higher amount.

Really terrible how they handled this. Like I said, they process and authorize all cashouts requests before the cash is available at the cage.

He's going to come on tonight around 11pm PDT.

I'm going to ask him some questions about this, including regarding him being "escorted off property" when he went down to Caesars to discuss it. What?!

While I wouldn't be surprised if some of these cashouts were intentionally kept under 10k, it really does look like this was a combination of overreaction by Caesars and the usual wsop.com fail where you can't get answers for anything.

BTW, this would be the dumbest form of structuring, because Caesars keeps all records of your online play. Most structuring transactions are for purposes of money laundering or income-hiding.

Live poker has its share of players committing structuring offenses, but online players doing so wouldn't make any practical sense, given the records kept.

Mike attempted to bring up the following in the interview, but didn't elaborate.

Each month, there's a $25,000 freeroll tournament that is limited to the players that won one of the 12 (or 18) WSOPC Online Ring Events OR finishing in the top 10 on the leaderboard for events during that series.

For whatever reason, there was never a leaderboard published online for this month's series. What happened was that players who were in the top 10 of the overall WSOP Online Circuit Leaderboard were awarded seats into the freeroll. One of those players happened to be Mike and he was one of the 12 players that registered. The $25,000 freerolls pay 12 places but need 14 for the tournament to run. They've paid out the 12 players who registered (including Mike), each receiving $2,083.30.

https://twitter.com/MikeHoltz47/stat...01961337663488

One may ask why they don't just register players automatically to prevent situations like this from happening, but that's above my pay grade.

Thanks for the additional info, Kevmath. You always bring the goods.

As promised, I interviewed Mike on radio on Friday night. You can find it at the 1:05:00 mark: https://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sh...r-Strikes-Back

Honestly, this was worse than I thought. If you don't have an hour or so to listen to the segment, here's what Mike said:

- He's currently the WSOP.com Online Player of the Year leader. He made a few 4-figure cashouts in February, like $5k, $4k, and $7k. All of these were cash-at-cage.

- He then made larger cashouts in March and April, two over $35k, two around $13k.

- In May, he tried to log into his Caesars Rewards (Total Rewards) account, and got an error code, telling him to talk to a Caesars Rewards rep

- Later that day, after successfull logging into WSOP.com and registering for 2 tournaments, the software crashed. He tried to log back in, and he was suddenly banned from the site. His two tournaments, which cost about $770 total to enter, blinded off. He also vanished from the Player of the Year leaderboard.

- Phone support was useless, and told him someone would call him within 72 hours. It didn't happen.

- He tried to go down to Caesars Rewards, as per the message on the site. After talking to a rep, a manager was brought out, who had security with her. He was then banned from the property, and told he can't come back to any Caesars property or he will be arrested!

- He finally got a hold of WSOP.com manager Danielle Barille, only by getting her e-mail address from a friend. She called him and told him he was suspected of "structuring" back in February with those 3 cashouts. He tried to explain he wasn't structuring, and in fact made several large cashouts in March and April which should disprove those suspicions. She asked for his tax returns from 2019 and 2020, which he immediately sent.

- 6 more days passed, first with getting the runaround with no conclusive answers, and then abruptly reappearing on the leaderboard. He was also unbanned. Nobody notified him of this, and to this date, nobody has made further contact. Danielle ignores his e-mails now.

- He is still banned from all Caesars properties, despite being unbanned on WSOP.com, and being back on their POY leaderboard!!! Even worse, nobody at WSOP.com will help him, simply passing the buck to "another department" (which also isn't helping), and washing their hands of it. He cannot reach anyone to assist with this, but did get verification that his Caeasars ban is because of WSOP.com, so 100% this should be undone given that WSOP.com unbannned him.

Is this bullshit, or what? Look how they are treating their current PLAYER OF THE YEAR. Dreadful.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mike Holtz

Finally unbanned from Caesars after the mix up. Unfortunate I lost 10 days of the grind but were still holding a small lead for world series of poker player of the year. Wsop.com staff were actually very helpful towards the end. I wish they would've handled this better from the get go but at the end of it all the important thing is everything is resolved

---

:yes


This was WSOP.com's responsibility. They finally got it done, but only after all this trouble (and perhaps shaming online). Dreadful way they treated their points leader, but I'm glad it's over.

How about this little item today from poker pro Katie Stone:


Katie Stone
@KatieStonePoker
Is multi-accounting @wsopcom a much bigger problem rn because of the online bracelets or is this just a big problem in general?
1:01 PM · Jul 20, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

[Apologies I have never been able to figure out how to copy and post a tweet here]

Stone would be a very interesting guest for the next radio show.