We have an epidemic in small-medium poker tournaments. It's happening in Las Vegas. It's happening in LA. It's happening around the world.
I'm talking about cancellation of guaranteed prizepools.
Offering a series with guarantees is a risk. It attracts more players, but it also leaves casinos potentially on the hook to lose money.
That's fine. No card room is forced to offer a guarantee, just as you and I are not forced to gamble. When you choose to gamble, you shouldn't be allowed to take back the money just because you lost.
However, taking back lost money is exactly what these casinos are doing. They're offering "guaranteed" prize pools, but often finding ways out of actually paying the guaranteed amount if they don't collect enough buyins to cover it. In many cases these days, "guaranteed" only means "Guaranteed so long as we collected that much anyway!"
That's like an outdoor sporting event guaranteeing refunds if it rains, but only honoring that guarantee if it's sunny with blue skies!
This is straight up fraud and deceptive marketing, but unfortunately no venue has suffered any kind of consequence for doing so. They just present a lame excuse (or none at all) and move forward as if it never happened.
Nevada has the strongest gaming commission of any state. It's also the oldest gaming commission. There are certain cases where the NGCB (Nevada Gaming Control Board) has put the smackdown on unethical casinos, and forced them to make things right to affected players. However, there are other cases where the NGCB is confused or lackadaisical, and the casinos get away with shenanigans. Often the latter occurs in areas where the NGCB has poor understanding of the complexities of the situation. This has been the case with online poker, and it is once again screwing our community with the "guaranteed prizepool" situation.
It is time to change that. I am going to make a strong attempt to educate the NGCB about the epidemic regarding casinos cheating patrons out of guaranteed prizepools, and strongly encourage them to start taking action.
How do I plan to do that? Read on....