Controversy surrounds Challenge Durrrr promo on Full Tilt Poker

When an online poker room holds a huge promotion that is exclusive to their players, such as the recent Challenge Durrrr promotion run by Full Tilt Poker, the last thing they want is any bad publicity to come from the promotion, and controversy is precisely what is surrounding the Full Tilt Poker Challenge Durrrr contest.

The promotion was suppose to pit Full Tilt Poker players in a series of challenges -Cash Games, Multi-Table Tournaments, and Sit and Go Tournaments before culminating with the last player standing taking on Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan in a series of four heads-up Sit and Go tournaments, with up to $1.5 million on the line. What ended up happening was that the player who won the Matrix Sit & Go portion of the promotion -the penultimate challenge in the promotion-was replaced with the second place finisher, with no explanation given by Full Tilt Poker at this time.

The player in question is from Russia according to Full Tilt Poker, and uses the screen-name “svetamillion”. A number of conclusions have been drawn across the poker forums, with everything from multi-accounting to collusion being tossed around -or perhaps ‘svetamillion’ is underage, has previous infractions on the site, or maybe he lives in a locale that doesn’t have legalized online poker like Washington State or Venus (I’m not sure if Full Tilt’s license covers interplanetary online poker at this point).

Full Tilt Poker has not commented on the reason for the disqualification, but they did issue a short statement to PokerNewsDaily.com stating: “I can confirm that the player who got first place in the Matrix portion of the promo was disqualified. I can also say it didn’t have anything to do with the Matrix itself.” Even Dwan seemed perplexed by the late scratch of ‘svetamillion’, posting the following in the 2+2 thread on the topic: “Curious about the back story – 1st I’m hearing of this.”

So, while the Challenge Durrrr promotion should have been a highly publicized affair, with the chance to change the life of some anonymous Full Tilt Poker player, instead it turned into an online poker sideshow -there have been too many of these lately-with the side-story grabbing all the headlines.

The Challenge Durrrr finale still went on with “inorej” taking the place of the disqualified ‘svetamillion’, although ‘inorej’ lost all four matches against Dwan, and would walk away empty-handed. Dwan and Full Tilt Poker decided to donate $10,000 to Japan relief efforts for each win in the finale, and therefore raised $40,000 for a very noble cause.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•