Hi, my name is David Afework and I recently won $160 000 on Party poker. It was my biggest win ever and the most amazing moment of my life. However today I received an email from party poker telling me that I have been disqualified because they believe I gave my account to a third party
Which is just complete rubbish. I played on my account, on my Dell Laptop in the room I had been living in for months, my girlfriend (who has no understanding of poker) was the only person that saw me throughout the time of the tournament. I was completely alone for 99% of the time. I imagine this third party nonsense comes from the fact that I have been living with another poker player for the best part of 7 months so maybe they see we share the same ip address or whatever but I'm completely transparent about that and don't want to hide that, no one has ever had access to my account other than myself, that's a 100% guarantee.

The truth is I played the tournament and I won, it's as simple as that and to see how Party poker have taken things is just the biggest disappointment ever and I'm just at a loss for words. Making it to the final table with some really good players to then come out on top was just wow. I played better than I ever have and also had the luck I needed on the way. Even the final hand like, to crack aces with the flush on the river like come on, or when I took out Jamie staples who had King queen suited and flopped a two pair and I flopped the flush with ten six of hearts. Everything was just going for me. So much so that after the tournament I whacked £2000 of my winnings onto roulette and got it up to £18 000. But they have taken it all away.

Either way went I lost a few thousand pounds in the weeks prior I never saw any concern from party poker towards me or my account, because there was no reason to. Now though I won, and I won big and they don't want me to win, it's as clear as day.

Anyhow, the reason I'm reaching out here on 2 + 2 is because I need the support of the community and I don't know how else to capture the communities attention. I have already contacted the UK gambling commission to inform them about what's happened as well as making the initial steps to take legal action. Has it ever happened to anyone before ?

If you feel compelled to get the word out it would be greatly appreciated. I'll keep those who are interested updated along the journey because it's going to be a long one.

I feel for you man! If you speak the truth, it must be your 16k roulette win.

Poker rooms are destroying their own business if this keeps going on. People get scared to deposit and to play if it is so easy for them to steal/keep money from players.

It would be better if a in depended third party keeps all the money and not the poker room.

I think Party tracks also your mouse movement with special software, so they can see if it is you that's playing... Maybe you can use that in court to prove it was you that was playing.

GL in court... 160k is worth it!

I would get into contact with Rob Yong and Partypoker through Twitter and ask them to take a look at this

GL OP, a friend of mine going through a similar situation with 888 (though I shan't derail your thread). Poker rooms need to be held accountable for **** like this.

OP. So your flat mate was not home the entire time you were making this deep run ? If you can find a way to prove that it should help your cause ?

I think this highlights the potential danger of poker players living together. It’s natural to rail a friend closely in this situation . Are you supposed to just watch silently?

Hi Devplaza:

I think you need to quickly hire an attorney who has a good understanding of gambling law, especially for the country that you live in which I think is England. He'll probably be expensive, but the right person with the right attorney skills might be able to put a lot of pressure on Party.

Now I have no idea as to why this was done (and depending on their guidelines plus the specifics of the situation they may have been correct to hold the payment up), and I suspect that they won't want to tell you all of their reasons for not paying you. But a good attorney might be able to force the information out of Party as to why this decision not to pay you was done. And once this is done, you may have something you can challenge plus the poker site may not like the bad publicity that they might get.

Best wishes,
Mason

They didn't give you further reasoning on why they suspected someone else was using your account??

hope this is a genuine mistake and OP gets his money if he did nothing wrong

Remember the bad publicity card can only be played once.

You got Joey in this thread Devplaza. That's your best chance at getting this taken care of without legal recourse.

Was this the tournament where Jaime finished third? I watched a lot of that FT and (no offence) OP didn't play like a professional. Hope this gets sorted. Seems crazy they can just withhold that much money.

This.

I happened to be watching and the announcers were even commenting on OPs less then conventional approach. They were cheering hard for him bc of this.

OP, you should contact the announcers. I think it was James Dempsey, Patrick Leonard, and Henry Kilbane. Think they normally do the PP streams. They might be able to help you.

Going to be an interesting thread to follow

GL getting your money back OP assuming everything is as described in your post

+1 for contacting Joey and Pads directly decent chance they may be able to help out here assuming everything occurred exactly as you claimed.

No. OP can do so much more before going the legal route. Once you mention the legal aspect of this to a site, the site can just state that they need to receive all correspondence from your legal representative to theirs and they wont discuss your account with you further directly. That will get very expensive, very fast, unnecessarily.

@OP, post the full email chain etc from Party about this here

Hi pmartsouth:

I agree that what you say is probably accurate except I don’t think they’ll discuss his account any more with him anyway.

Best wishes,
Mason

Seems like they would have a tough time proving it wasn't you, unless your play style changed completely.

Sounds like a f***up by Party, OP you have my full support - which is worth nothing^^

160,000 is definitely lawyer territory. pretty shocking that they would blatantly steal your money like that, but party poker has done a lot of really sketchy things in the past so I'm not surprised.

When they disqualify the 1st place winner, do they give the 2nd place winner 1st place money and so on or do they just keep the money?

In a horse race, if the winner is disqualified, the 2nd place finisher comes in 1st and so on. The house pays out all the pool to the betters and the prize money to the owners of the horses. It doesn't make any more money than if no one was disqualified.

Industry standard is to not give out evidential information to the player.

More detailed information will be provided to legal representatives if that route is taken.



In my experience as an integrity agent 99% of people who post like this on 2+2 are not accurate about their circumstances or behaviour.



IF OP legitimately played the tournament:

then he should engage a lawyer and make a complaint to the relevant dispute resolution authority, at this point Party will be obligated to justify their decision with internal information that would not be released to the player.


A confiscation of this size will have to have been signed off at a high level in any company run by competent adults, for this to have been signed off they clearly thought that they had the requisite proof to withstand a legal complaint. Understand that Party really don't benefit nor are they incentivised to take such actions, they don't keep the funds, and have to inform players a fraudulent player was active on their site and they only caught them after they had binked big.


Theoretically the money should be paid out as if the player hadn't existed, so 2nd goes 1st etc etc. However given the scale of the payout and the likelihood of complaint or dispute, it would be foolish for them to action any form of prize pool adjustment until such time as the confiscated player had time to go through all reasonable legal avenues and the case was fully resolved.

lsaw brings up some great points

I want to believe OP, but party has no incentive to do this maliciously, and it's too big of a payout for an oversight to have been likely.

Curious to see how this plays out though

We all know how David Afework plays of course...

Judge yourself with the recorded stream of OP final table. Just kidding David, hope you played yourself and that you will get your money in the end.

WPT500 Final Table | 1st $160.210 | $1M Gtd | Buy-in $530 | partypoker

This is why decentralized poker needs to happen. GL to the OP.

In the past I have completely changed my playstyle between hands. That's not proof of anything.

Thanks for the link!

Quote from the commentators, around this timestamp:David doubles up

"He's played a lot of hands, and then he gets the aces!"

Multiple comments ITT, and the commentators, seem to point to this being a true bink.

One question to the original poster - can you just confirm, do you know whether or not your roommate played in this tournament also?