this is truly sad to read, but unlike the PPC's friends, I'm not surprised at all.

they hired my gf to host some of their West Coast stops. she worked a few for them, but soon quit the job because they slow-paid her, and also because they initially refused to pay her half a day's rate for her travel days, as she had negotiated. they ended up caving and paying her, but it was obvious to both of us that the company/owners had some issues, either financial or just with competence in general (likely both).

I am glad she quickly detached herself from this company, which pretty clearly appears to be a Ponzi scheme that has unraveled, based off the request for investor funds posted by Andy (that email is disgusting and potentially criminal evidence).

whether done with criminal intent or not, another poker company bites the dust... should be interesting to see how this one plays out. I am hoping the players are made whole somehow.

EDIT: and just FTR, everyone talking about how likeable these guys are... yeah, maybe if you are a middle-aged man. my gf immediately complained about Sandy and his misogynistic and inappropriate comments and behavior.

I am wondering how much of that prize pool was actual cash, as it seems like almost everyone satties in for that Aruba tourney. and obviously they are pulling tricks and misappropriating funds, so the real value of those seats were obviously not there this year. it finally fell apart. something like that, I assume.

I'd be pretty shocked if they just stole the cash from the prize pool, but obviously am not ruling that out.

The lion share of the payout money would have never been in Aruba, so the slow government funding story doesn't hold water. Most of the entry money collected for the event was collected in the US. Why would they bring it to Aruba if the intent was to pay by wire anything over $10,000 as they did last year.

also FTR, I have always liked Bryan. Sandy is another thing altogether. I have never trusted in their business skills and last year I had a personal dealing with them that made me question their business ethics. However, I thought those ethics issues were centered around business financials between employee/employer, not to the extent that the solvency of the entire tour would be in question.

Also, your GF is a peach and I'm glad I got to meet her in the Dells in WI this year. The fact that they didn't know how to utilize her skills to make the tour better adds to the point that they just had no clue what they were doing.

this seems to be the consensus. thanks for the compliment about gf, I'm a lucky guy!

Probable thief and scammer Bryan Oulton just deleted his twitter account.

sounds like incompetence in this case , which I have seen time and time again with players left holding the bag. I don't see too many of these fraudsters being punished by jail time though.

The next best thing asides playing is reading these scam/meltdown threads. I love this stuff.

AUGUST 7th, 2014..........
PPC Poker Tour Adds Mark “P0ker H0” Kroon as Team Pro; Player’s Bar Becomes Sponsor
As a Team Pro AND a sponsor, has Mark commented on any of the latest PPC INactivity or lack of response?
I would like to hear his take on this. He seems like a respectable guy that would be willing to comment...........

Oh it's great entertainment for us, but terrible for the victims.

Take Joan, the 6th place "winner" as an example. Some of us were introduced to her by the Trooper as he covered this PPC event in Aruba. She satellited into this event through an online qualifier. My assumption is that she mostly plays microstakes online. What a great story it was for her to qualify for this tournament, make it to the final table and get the first cash of her career for $21,390 and now these ****bags just stole that money from her. This is absolutely disgusting.

My favorite classic Admo .....isathief.com creation was http://nickraineyisathief.com/

I think you've handled yourself very well in this thread. You obviously have a lot of various professional and non-professional relationships with people involved on both sides.

And you've had information which if released could potentially [negatively] effect the likelihood of players been paid, but if not released potentially effect the likelihood of further investors being fleeced.

Really seems like a no-win situation for you and I think, regardless of the objective realities - that you have genuinely tried to do what you thought was the most ethical way to handle the situation.

Someone has been busy on their website deleting nearly everything except "details about 2017 tour coming soon".

i like how they think all the stuff they deleted is just gone from the internet.

ya step #1 delete teh internetz.

For whatever reason I can't log on to my old account gibler321. I got 5th in this main event last year. I had won some package in some random Foxwoods tournament. If I remember right the entire package was paid for including all buy ins + mainevent. The smallest of buy ins was like ~$100. After getting deep in the main and not being able to play most other events, I talked to Sandy and Bryan about getting my unused buy ins back. It took a bit of back and forth, but I was able to get the cash there. Bryan asked for a tip after, which super rubbed me the wrong way lol. Anyway top 4 in the main that year got $5k packages to come back for this years event. Kinda sucks I could've gotten screwed.

PS has there ever been a series held in Aruba that didn't end up being scam? I went to the old UB event back in the day too and they still have a ton of my $$$.

No idea if it is worth pursuing since on line the word is that gaming regulation in Aruba is pretty loose, but I found this about the agency.

If I were one of the affected I would see about filing a complaint against the casino.

What exactly do you think happened to the cash? Naive much?

"Oh, I'm sure they put the money in something safe like AAA-rated coupon bonds and are just waiting for the dividends to come in . . ."

WTF??? It's completely naive to think that anything else happened to the money other than being stolen and used by the two scumbags.

Funny part about this is I'm pretty sure this is where the money went. Sandy and Bryan bought controlling rights of Hilton Poker Room this year. I already posted on the Hilton web page, but I would strongly urge the legal counsels involved to look into that connection between the PPC and the Hilton.


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Should have someone who doesnt want to end up in real serious trouble say where the money went. This wont end well for anyone

I won one of the Aruba seats at the Council Bluffs Horseshoe PPC. We were one of the last stops and also have a newborn, so I decided to delay the trip until 2017 instead of going or trying to sell it. Appreciate the commentary in the thread and hopefully we will have some sort of positive resolution.

Actually, this stuff usually end up pretty well for the guilty parties.

Like if you read these scam threads through and there's some outcome you usually say to yourself, "Man I wouldn't want to be that guy" referring to the victim. Rarely does the scammer really get what's coming to them.

I'm new to this forum, and unfortunately, my first experience is this PPC situation. I was actually getting excited about the PPC events scheduled at Tampa Bay Downs/Silks next month, but now I'm not so sure. Years ago, as an Assistant Attorney General in Florida, it was my job to prosecute ponzi scheme operators. Now that I'm in private practice (civil litigation), I would love to go after these turkeys if what I've read is true. To put an even nastier icing on the cake, when I Googled one of the names mentioned, I see that his father was convicted 14 months ago in South Florida for killing his mother. His "reason" for killing her? Because she was interfering in his son's "poker tour." I couldn't make this stuff up. What a mess...

I think the other person was implying that it wasn't like everything in their business was hunky dory and they just up and took the entire prize pool and blew the money on hookers and blow. I think it's most likely they kept using prize pool money to pay previous business obligations, other investments into the business, paying themselves a little too high of a salary compared to the profit generated, etc. Their business was probably losing money for awhile, and they kept using the money that came in to pay off previous obligations (instead of keeping prize pool money segregated), and were slowpaying everyone that was due money until the next wave of money came in from the next event, and it finally blew up at the point of this final table. It's fairly easy to rationalize this behavior until all the sudden you're in too deep. Your start out being short $2k to pay a vendor, so you borrow it from the prize pool, because you know in 3 days when the next tournament runs, you'll have $5k of profit from it. Then 3 days becomes 6, $2k becomes $8k, etc, a year or two goes by, and now how are you supposed to come up $300k that your business was in the hole that you kept borrowing ahead and slowpaying?

I checked the Silks January tournament calendar, and there are no PPC events on the schedule, that was before the PPC site took down the event schedule.

If you're really interested I can help put you in touch with people that you can help. Please contact me via DM.