Bovada/Ignition players getting underpaid or no-paid for tournament cashes -- and are getting few answers

[Dan Druff]

Really weird situation going on right now on Bovada/Ignition regarding their tournaments. I assume it's some kind of technical error, but they are not rectifying it quickly, nor is support helpful to anyone.

A poker player on Twitter/X sent me a DM indicating that something bizarre had happened with his 2nd place finish in a $20,000 $162 event on March 7. He finished 2nd out of 193 entries for $4632. He sent me the screen shot of this finish. However, bizarrely he was paid out just $1186, and the display erroneously showed he finished in 6th place. Indeed, $1186 was sixth place money, as seen below:





Just in case you think the guy might be lying (or confused) about finishing 2nd, here is a screen shot of his Twitter DMs with Ignition about the matter, where they confirm he finished 2nd, but bizarrely claim he was only due $1186 -- the exact amount listed for sixth on his screen!




Despite their assurance that his payout was accurate, he kept pressing, and Ignition eventually told him that they would look into it and get back to him.

That's when he contacted me, and I told him it was obviously some weird error, and to give it a few days to resolve. I assumed this was some one-off glitch which would be discovered soon enough.

But wait... he wasn't the only victim of this! Read on....

[Dan Druff]

Players "Snoopdoug" (Doug Parscale), Ruben Costa, and others have indicated on X that they've had similar problems with being paid properly for Bovada/Ignition tournaments recently.

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/PuntingStacks/status/1898569318037942553

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/freitag666/status/1898858168429752367

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/wugwugwugwug/status/1898858414463209828




Additionally, two other players, "MD" and Neal Anderson both had similar issues:

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/veteranderson/status/1898681017252401482

Notice that "MD" above also finished 2nd (like the guy who contacted me), and was given a nonsensical finishing place (44th), and therefore underpaid.

It appears that Snoopdog and Ruben were not paid at all.



Note that in all cases, these players are reporting that support was "vague" and "unhelpful".

It has now been two days, and nothing has gotten any better.

[Dan Druff]

Do I think Bovada/Ignition is intentionally cheating people?

No.

I think their system is royally fucked up. The players shown above are just a tiny fraction of those affected by this. There are probably hundreds or thousands of players who have been no-paid or underpaid.

It is likely this will be resolved eventually, but players are understandably unnerved, especially with support being unhelpful.

Not only is support refusing to acknowledge a problem, the Bovada X account is busy tweeting about Kawhi Leonard as of 4 hours ago, but has made no statement about this disturbing matter.


For those wondering, Bovada and Ignition exist on the same network, and mostly run the same tournaments. Players are both sites are affected.

I am going to reach out to Bovada and see if we can get some answers here.


Developing....

[WSPreadHead]

seems a number of players at 2+2 have been giving the runaround from CS, and told the payouts are correct and the matter is closed... not a good look. Gonna pull my money off today... too easy to redeposit and not taking a chance

[Sate]

The more time passes, the more it seems they will just ignore and hope the issue gets forgotten? Afterall, do they really care about winning players?

[Dan Druff]

Ignition finally acknowledging it:

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/IgnitionCasino/status/1899515464587289050


Bovada has made no statement yet, but has acknowledged the issue privately with me.

Really badly handled... and we are going on 4 days now.



Haley Hintze did a good article about it on poker.org, and mentioned PFA: https://www.poker.org/latest-news/pl...-aw77P4N0U2Kf/


Pokernews.... crickets.

Cardplayer... crickets.

Very disappointing.

Oddly enough, I cannot find a Bovada or Ignition affiliate link on Pokernews, so I'm not sure why they are staying quiet.

[Dan Druff]

This was resolved last week, and I forgot to post about it.

Everyone was paid what they were owed, as far as I'm aware.

This is not a surprise. Given the large number of people affected, it would have been impossible for Bovada/Ignition to sweep this under the rug. Furthermore, I do not believe this was intentional, nor do I believe that the initial denials by support were intentional lies.

I believe this was a matter of Bovada/Ignition support being dismissive and refusing to listen to the player, which they have been accused of many times before. I've even experienced that personally from them.

This was poorly handled from a PR standpoint, as well. Ignition took days to publicly acknowledge what should have been almost immediately obvious, and Bovada never did. This left players very rattled and unnerved.

Regardless, it's important for poker media to hold sites' feet to the fire about matters like these. Not only does it encourage fair resolution, but it also speeds up that resolution. It is disappointing that, besides Poker Fraud Alert, only poker.org covered it.

I should note that the poker.org writer covering it was Haley Hintze, who truly cares about honesty and transparency in the industry. I have a ton of respect for her. If she was not writing for poker.org, I wonder if it would have been covered at all over there. Still, they did publish the article, so props to them. Everyone else.... not so much.