Genting to repay £70,000 to WPT London players & dealers!

[Simon Tomsett]

  Apologies for late response. For the benefit of any doubt all registration fees and prize fund deductions for both the main event and high roller events have been clearly advertised on the WPT website.

 Main Event £300 fee + 4% prize fund deduction. At no time has there been any attempt to hide this fact. Intervention by the police would be most welcome. The Gambling Commission have been contacted in this matter.

With regard to agency dealers, they were contracted through Prestige. All terms and conditions were emailed to to each dealer prior to commencement. Any agency dealer with a grievance should contact Prestige directly, who will reaffirm terms and conditions.

Any player or dealer who wishes to contact me to discuss may do so. I will not take any telephone enquiries, as I cannot be sure of whom I am dealing with. Anynonmous allegations will not be answered.

[outragous76]

another excellent reponse

gl with this event next year

[titaniumbean]

  Apologies for late response. For the benefit of any doubt all registration fees and prize fund deductions for both the main event and high roller events have been clearly advertised on the WPT website.

 Main Event £300 fee + 4% prize fund deduction. At no time has there been any attempt to hide this fact. Intervention by the police would be most welcome. The Gambling Commission have been contacted in this matter.

With regard to agency dealers, they were contracted through Prestige. All terms and conditions were emailed to to each dealer prior to commencement. Any agency dealer with a grievance should contact Prestige directly, who will reaffirm terms and conditions.

Any player or dealer who wishes to contact me to discuss may do so. I will not take any telephone enquiries, as I cannot be sure of whom I am dealing with. Anynonmous allegations will not be answered.

I think you were meant to put some more *****'s so you could hide the extra juice even further down the bottom of the page.



Fancy discussing the 10% witheld for staff from the rebuy event?


Any chance of transparency on where you spunked all this money?

[ACE2M]

Go on Mr Tomsett, i dare you to tell the truth.

Something like this i imagine? We had grand ideas and someone said they could get IVey to come for 30k, so we paid them, we needed to get that back so we thought we'd take it out of the prize pool, obviously we couldn't tell the players to give us £200 each for this reason so we said it was for the dealers. It worked out sweet as, oh wait, someone's rumbled us.....

[Acidmouse]

What a complete fukup, not helped by the fact they get away with the whole thing because it was printed on some website in tiny letters that no one noticed before the fleecing took place.

Just because everything is done above the law does not make is right or the correct thing to do.

lol so much at bringing in 'Star' poker players and charging normal punters the cost to what play against them? or ask for an autograph?

[SuuPRlim]

  Apologies for late response. For the benefit of any doubt all registration fees and prize fund deductions for both the main event and high roller events have been clearly advertised on the WPT website.

 Main Event £300 fee + 4% prize fund deduction. At no time has there been any attempt to hide this fact. Intervention by the police would be most welcome. The Gambling Commission have been contacted in this matter.

With regard to agency dealers, they were contracted through Prestige. All terms and conditions were emailed to to each dealer prior to commencement. Any agency dealer with a grievance should contact Prestige directly, who will reaffirm terms and conditions.

Any player or dealer who wishes to contact me to discuss may do so. I will not take any telephone enquiries, as I cannot be sure of whom I am dealing with. Anynonmous allegations will not be answered.

So if something is clearly advertised, and an entire community of people (convieniantly you're customers) don't see it, is it actually clearly advertised? I mean surely we define clearly by how clear it is = how many people actually saw it?

if this is the case, then it probably wasn't clear, in that situation you've heavily mis-represented, you may not have done it deliberately, but still I think its a point where the field deserve an apology as people stumped up £5300 without knowing exactly what they were getting for it.

[Descartes]

 Main Event £300 fee + 4% prize fund deduction. At no time has there been any attempt to hide this fact. Intervention by the police would be most welcome. The Gambling Commission have been contacted in this matter.

Well that's good to hear. Seems he wants the police to look into it, so there must be something dodgy going on. So what is your definition of 'Poker Room Staff'?

Easiest way to deal with this is a simple small claims court action and Mr Tomsett can stand in court with the evidence (and yes it will be you standing alone in court) then we can see which newspaper would like the article headline 'Top Posh Casino in £35k tip scandal!.

The Gambling Commission is interested and are urging anyone to come forward with details so that they can correlate the complaints and launch a full investigation. They will take action prior or subsequent to any court action so a small claims will not effect them investigating. They did seem to be aware of some serious aspects to this case that I highlighted, which they would like to look into further.

If you are a dealer or a player who would like further advice on how to structure the small claims application then please PM me.

Simon Tomsett has clearly identified himself as being fully responsible on behalf of The Palm Beach as its' Poker Manager, so this action does not involve Prestige People or Fox's. If you work with either of these companies you are still able to take direct action without implicating either of these companies who supplied staff in good faith.

Subject to evidence supplied at the small claims court police involvement will follow.

My press contacts have stated they will take an active interest as soon as the first application is made at the courts.

It seems to me that both the WPT, who I have left telephone messages with, and Simon Tomsett are both determined to bring the Palm Beach and the WPT into disrepute over this matter. I only hope that Genting is reassessing the wisdom of employing Mr Tomsett and the potential damage that he seems to be determined to wreak.

[titaniumbean]

out of interest what is a 'prize fund deduction' defined as?

[Longines]

Easiest way to deal with this is a simple small claims court action and Mr Tomsett can stand in court with the evidence (and yes it will be you standing alone in court)

[...]

Simon Tomsett has clearly identified himself as being fully responsible on behalf of The Palm Beach as its' Poker Manager, so this action does not involve Prestige People or Fox's.

Hope your dealing is better than your understanding of contract law.

[Descartes]

Easiest way to deal with this is a simple small claims court action and Mr Tomsett can stand in court with the evidence (and yes it will be you standing alone in court)

[...]

Simon Tomsett has clearly identified himself as being fully responsible on behalf of The Palm Beach as its' Poker Manager, so this action does not involve Prestige People or Fox's.

Hope your dealing is better than your understanding of contract law.

Doesn't need to be, as an entertainment company, my solicitor deals exclusively with the entertainment business and all that involves in relation to complex payment schedules. I'm not just a dealer as those involved in this will soon learn to their detriment.

If you're not involved I would keep your trite and incorrect comments to yourself, unless you have a vested interest in protecting those breaking the law or have all the facts, to which I would ask how you obtained them.

[rex008]

Did the dealers' contract state they would be receiving a proportion of the extra £200 juice? If so, it's clearly breach of contract. If not, it's clearly not.

Question I think most people reading this thread are asking is, what actually happened to the 35k extra taken off? Who did it go to? If players were under the impression it was instead of a tip for the dealers, then there was clearly some very bad communication going on.

[StuartHopkin]

Easiest way to deal with this is a simple small claims court action and Mr Tomsett can stand in court with the evidence (and yes it will be you standing alone in court)

[...]

Simon Tomsett has clearly identified himself as being fully responsible on behalf of The Palm Beach as its' Poker Manager, so this action does not involve Prestige People or Fox's.

Hope your dealing is better than your understanding of contract law.

Doesn't need to be, as an entertainment company, my solicitor deals exclusively with the entertainment business and all that involves in relation to complex payment schedules. I'm not just a dealer as those involved in this will soon learn to their detriment.

If you're not involved I would keep your trite and incorrect comments to yourself, unless you have a vested interest in protecting those breaking the law or have all the facts, to which I would ask how you obtained them.

But surely the contracts are not with Mr Tomsett?

[Honeybadger]

For the benefit of any doubt all registration fees and prize fund deductions for both the main event and high roller events have been clearly advertised on the WPT website.

 Main Event £300 fee + 4% prize fund deduction. At no time has there been any attempt to hide this fact.

Hmmmm... in fact it looks like this is not true.

I'm looking at the website http://www.worldpokertour.com/Shared/Tournaments/Seasons/Season_9/WPT_London_Poker_Classic.aspx and this event was NOT marked with a **, so therefore it was not advertised as having a 4% deduction.

Simon Tomsett's two responses on here are utterly awful obviously. They are terribly written which means it is not 100% clear what he is actually trying to say. But what he appears to be saying looks pretty bad of course, especially the implication that the extra £200 was to pay some guys for getting Phil Ivey to grace us with his presence. It's weird that Simon took ages to write his second post, then totally ignored most of the points that have been made on this thread.

Descartes seems to be doing a lot of posturing and threat-making; his tone comes across as, at best, rather silly. I presume he is Darcus on the associated 2+2 thread, wanting to know when Matt Savage is next flying into the UK so he can "notify the relevant authorities"! And all this stuff like "I'm not just a dealer as those involved in this will soon learn to their detriment"... Come on man, you're embarrassing yourself. It's cringeworthy, and it makes everyone reading it less likely to take your actual grievances seriously.

However, it certainly looks like there is a case to answer here on several different levels. Obviously there are two different grievances here. The first is the one that Descartes is mostly concerned with - why did the dealers not get their share of the 4% deduction? The second grievance is over the fact that the 4% was deducted in the first place, especially as it was not clearly advertised to the players beforehand. And of course these two grievances merge together... because I guess a lot of players would be pretty annoyed about a hidden extra deduction, but they might grudgingly put up with it if it is going to the people who dealt to them for the duration. But when it turns out that these dealers did not in fact get any of this deduction and instead it mostly went to some random guys from the USA....

2+2 link: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/65/mttc-live/discuss-wpt-details-executive-tournament-director-matt-savage-831192/index2.html

[titaniumbean]

Excellent post Numpty

[Descartes]

It seems the WPT have stated they had nothing to do with the money and that they only had one representative at the event. They clearly state the running of the tournament was the responsibility of the Palm Beach Casino and therefore Mr Tomsett.

The issues are very clear, either the money was taken for the poker room staff or it wasn't. The asterisk issue is a mute point, being that the 2 asterisks for the main event have been incorporated into the 3 asterisks as 4% was clearly taken from the prizepool in both tournaments.

So it's either theft or fraud. Either it's owed to the floor staff or owed to the players. The Gambling Commission are eager to launch an investigation as they have already been contacted by other involved parties and they clearly stated to me further issues they are concerned with.

Obviously most poker players will take the fact they've been mugged for £200 on the chin, the money probably doesn't matter too much to them, which is why they probably got mugged in the first place. The fact that this sends out the message that affluent poker players are easy targets for small scams or that people, companies and casinos can easily nip them whenever possible shouldn't be of any concern then.

Fortunately, the small claims court makes it very easy for people to contest small amounts and allows a public audience to the conduct of larger companies.

From my perspective, having already been denied work by Simon Tomsett for merely politely enquiring about the matter, I see no reason why I shouldn't make a claim. I haven't nothing to risk and have been advised that I have a strong case. Why a company or an individual would think that it's low paid workers are less inclined to expect fair treatment or less inclined to seek legal recourse to disputed monies is a mystery. They are exactly the people who will fight hardest for monies that others feel is inconsequential and are more concerned about who takes their hard earned money away from them.

Mr Tomsett can be rest assured that once the threatening and posturing ceases, then the real problems will start.

As for looking silly? Well, not half as silly as letting someone lift £200 out of my pocket whilst I say 'Yeah sure help yourself'.