Uhhh what if the clock just says fewer people than actually entered?

Because if they did that, the advertised buy-in at a $10k event, rather than being $9,700 (+$300), would be $9,000 (+$1000). It's better business sense to not let your clientele know exactly how much is being taken off the top up front.

Well, he does say;
"My contract expired at the end of Season 7. For the last 2 years I had to deal with a new management and not with John Duthie anymore who I built up the EPT together very successfully for the first 5 years. At some point I was asked if I were interested to take a job with PS and become an employee but I refused because I preferred my independence. I knew that the new management wanted to save costs and I realized that at the end my contract will probably not be renewed. Especially because I realized that PS started their own tournament service company, “gptl” who is now running the events for EPT and other tours.
"
If we believe this interview its clearly that PS had negotations with Kremser and that they both knew they were going to part ways. If they wanted to make Kremser an employee and he said no, they would have known that he was likely to leave/they didn't want to extend his contract.
PS scrambling to get together a team is probably more to the fact they underestimated the sheer scope of starting up a own service company and handling a tournament the size of EPT and their failour to "snap up" people already working for Kremser.

Again, follow up was required. When was this, "at some point"? He realized his contract wouldn't be renewed, but said he made the decision to leave long before Madrid. Did those negotiations terminate with one informing the other that the relationship was over and if so, when?

What could be a possible valid reason for not simply telling what exactly happened?? If somehow 4 dead stacks( of 123?) were pulled into pots or other players' stacks...accidentally, why not say it? If cheating players/others brought in chips from a previous tournament, why not reveal it? If someone took the money out of the prizepool, shouldn't we know who did it?

It is the suspicious hiding of the FACTS( not something 2+2ers are generally fond of) that causes doubt and unnecessary speculation about cover-ups etc. Unfair to everyone involved.

One or more persons were either incredibly incompetent, dishonest or both to cause 61,000 chips to appear or 20,000euro to disappear, correct?

What service does it do to EPT players, and the poker community as a whole, to protect those individual(s)?

I was 120k (20% of my stack) short after a chip race deep in an EPT s7. got sorted after I told TK and they re-counted the chips they had been taken out of play. they didn't stop the clock or anything so I wasn't a fan of the situation. luckily I could avoid any big pots before I got em back about 10 min later...

it would be such a blunt mistake by such a competent TD, just too obvious to be made by kremser imo. I´d be much more suspicious of players bringing chips to the tournament, I think that this might be a real issue and I strongly urge stars to use a new set of chips for basically every stop. They should be able to afford it.

If it came to your attention that the TD had a long record of said mistakes, that also he accepted payments from players for favorable rulings by 2 players who went onto win an EPT and also had a track record of lying to players regarding tips would you still call this one an honest mistake?

this is exactly how tournament staff get away with stealing buyins from the prize pool fwiw, not saying that it happened, but foxwoods staff ran a scam like this a few years back where they took X buyins worth of chips out of play then X buyins worth of cash out of PP

Read a new article about this in the Finnish media today. They interviewed a well known live reporter who was there in Madrid when Kremser first got caught. It's estimated that hundreds of thousands of euros went missing from EPT side event prize pools over the years. I was there as well, and afaik Stars just swept the whole mess under the rug (just like every other scandal). I don't think they ever refunded anyone anything except for that one tournament where he finally got caught.

Here's the link to the article, it's in Finnish. Ctrl+f "Thomas Kremser", that bit starts from when his name first gets mentioned. You can just google translate it, if it doesn't translate it properly I can do it at some point when I have time.

Apparently he also had a curious hobby of collecting sports cars which is probably a decent indication of how much money was stolen over the years.

I've heard a bunch of stuff about this over the years from many industry people and yeah it's f***ed up. What the article says should be pretty accurate.

You may have proven your title as "World's Most Interesting Procrastinator" by bumping a 7 year old thread because an article was published on a Finnish website. Just curious, was the article published 7 years ago and you just got around to posting itt or was the article recent, in which case the writer may have usrped your title.

indeed, interesting bump(and find).

thanks

The article was published on the day I posted. I think it's actually super interesting because this whole mess got swept under the rug pretty hard by PokerStars and they still owe players hundreds of thousands of euros (rough estimation) from this. A PokerStars emplyee basically stole players' funds for many years and once Stars found out, they decided to not tell anyone and not refund anyone. There are hundreds and hundreds of people who fell victim to this scam, myself included.

Also, a big reason why this never made it to the international media is because PokerStars owns (?) PokerNews*, and used their intimidation powers to stop them from publishing any articles about it. If this story was reported when it actually happened, it would have been a major newspiece.

This is one of the absolutely biggest scandals in modern poker history and you can barely find information about it in English because of PokerStars being their usual scummy selves. The story deserves to be told in full, imo. Too bad no major news website will do it, because I assume PokerStars still holds them on a tight leash.

*or idk, maybe they didn't own PokerNews back then but at least they were their biggest affiliate and somehow got them to not report it.

PokerStars possibly owes players money for events that were held in jurisdictions where a company might be liable for theft committed by a contractor.

I wouldn’t be surprised if language in the contract between PokerStars and Thomas Kremsers company was very precise about liability issues. There are examples of situations where an employer was held liable for theft committed by an employee, but AFAIK Thomas Kremser wasn’t employed by PokerStars. The company he owned was contracted by PokerStars which might mean they can only be held liable for damages if a court rules they knew about his criminal actions. That might be very difficult.

Sure, makes sense. Doesn't that just make this scummier by Stars though? Not informing the victims about what happened basically meant that no one even had a chance to pursue legal action.

Sure, extremely scummy by Stars if things really went down that way.

Agreed. Perhaps a correctly translated version of the article would help get the story a bit of traction.

I took the time to translate the part about Kremser from the interview.

Any other unforgettable events you have witnessed?

[Paragraph about the 2010 EPT Berlin robbery]

"Springing to mind is also a gig at EPT Madrid, when Pokerstars sacked tournament director Thomas Kremser. Stars had for some unfathomable reason made a seven year long deal with Kremser for the arrangement of EPT tournaments. At the time, his seventh year was underway, and in Stars' mind they were paying Kremser way too much. They wanted to negotiate a, for them, better contract, alternatively discontinue it. Kremser then got caught for a considerable swindle, and his career with the EPT ended then and there. Nobody knows for sure, was the decision to end the contract made before the theft was revealed, but the incident itself was clear cut. The case was discovered thanks to Juha Helppi. Helppi was one of three remaining players in a 5000 euro side event that was about to go on break for the day. The players were discussing a deal between them, when Helppi noticed, there were 80,000 chips more in play than there should be according to the number of entrants listed on the tournament info screen. It was undeniably clear that four players buyins had been embezzled from the prize pool. Pokerstars restored the 20,000 euro to the prize pool, but it is unknown, did that money come from Kremser or the company's own pockets.

Kremser with wife, and a gentleman named Gerard manually, between the three of them, handled all EPT cash transactions for seven years, until Pokerstars developed a computerised system for it. My careful estimate is that Kremser and his collaborators have stolen hundreds of thousands euros along the way. I have no evidence, but by Kremser and company's methods it was in my opinion easy to embezzle money from specifically large field side events. In these events it was more difficult to keep track of the actual numbers of entrants. In the main events Mad Harper ran such a tight ship that Kremser never had the chance to cabal. Harper made the players list himself and always debriefed the floor to make sure everything was ran to precision. To Kremser and his companions, skimming off the top in side events that no one was watching over was much less riskful. At that time all buyins were made cash in hand, so the process in question is no more difficult than handing the chips to the player and putting this buyin in your own pockets."

The tournament where Kremser finally was caught had only 123 player. Thus four buyins missing should be easily noticed.

"The more players, the less the risk of getting caught. In that last tournament there were, besides few players, also big money in question, and so Kremser finally got busted. This is just speculation, but I believe that from the EPT's thousand and two thousand euro side events, hundreds of thousands of euros have gone missing along the way. Nobody can of course know for sure, other than Kremser and his partners in crime. Maybe it is somewhat telling that Kremser had the peculiar hobby of collecting sports cars."

This story is disgusting on so many levels. Thanks for the bump, Chuck Bass.

wow i forget what year it was (i think 2009)
but it was for ept barcelona and i got into a heated argument with Thomas about a pay jump.
it may or may not be their rules, but i got knocked out in 33rd and 32nd paid like $3000 euro more or something like that.

the tv table was slowed for long periods of times for all ins and someone got knocked out on the tv table and i got knocked out like 1 minute later and thomas claimed he was watching and counting the hands on all table, which was a clear lie since the tv table was 100 feet away.

he also tried to claim i had the shorter stack of the two and no possible way he could ever know that. my all in was never counted and i was blocking my chips from him at all times. i also had only slightly below average stack

ive always disliked this guy ever since