Viffer Kicks Off in Tournament Guarantee Scam Fallout

What started off as somebody pointing out a factual inaccuracy on Twitter has led to one of the biggest social media shitstorms of the year. 

Handbags at Dawn

This whole spat began with Pocketfives Community Manager Kevin Mathers helping to promote a tournament on his Twitter account.

Almost instantly a whole bunch of familiar names were bickering over the details of the tournament guarantee which, as it turns out, was not quite as much of a guarantee as the casino was making out. In a $1,100 buy-in Monster Stack Main Event Qualifier, $250,000 was proudly displayed with the tournament details, but with an inconspicuous asterisk tagged alongside.

As you can see from the small print, the casino is only prepared to honour the guarantee if 200 players register. Does that mean it’s not a real guarantee then? Quite a few people agree with that point of view.

High-stakes pro Matt Glantz made his feelings quite clear.

And to be fair, he also went a step further to compliment Mathers for all he does for the poker community. Then matters took a turn for the worst.

Out of Line

Allen Kessler, a well-known but not so well-respected long-time poker player, started getting out of line towards the well-liked Mathers.

Mathers is known for churning out tweet after tweet about poker tournaments all over the world. Why should he be held to account for not checking every detail? David “Viffer” Peat appears to know a bit about Kessler and his poker activities, and so started to fire back.

Well, it turns out that Kessler is, by popular opinion, not a clear winner in the games that he plays in. Even with more than $3.5 million in live tournament winnings could it be true he’s selling action while losing money overall? That’s quite scandalous if true.

Kessler is known throughout the live scene as the “Chainsaw”, because of a single tournament where he supposedly wheeled out an intimidating playing style. It is known as one of the most contradictory nicknames in poker as Kessler is just a massive nit with very little creativity. “Chainsaw Approved” is even a common slogan to indicate a great value tournament structure!

The crux of the matter, as ever, can always be tracked down by the tax department.

This started to kill off the argument as no straight answer was forthcoming. Viffer went straight for the jugular when he tweeted to finish the matter off.

There’s not a day that goes by without something hitting the headlines about something in poker that isn’t quite what it claims to be.