They have to pay taxes on what they won based on the chop, not the listed payout. If they intended to hide the fact that they didn’t get the listed payout, they wouldn’t have made it that obvious.

It’s just unfortunate that the WPT And WSOP refuse to accept chops. The EPT even assists players with numbers and stuff and most importantly provides security by paying players the chop amounts so nobody has to be afraid of being scammed.

Pretty sure if the WPT helped facilitate chops, players would agree to play for a small amount set aside for the winner. That would make sure everyone gets home (or to the pits) soon while nobody loses on purpose.

Two Canadians in a tournament in Canada, they don't owe any taxes on these winnings

Wow, this issue is all over Twitter now. A lot of players not happy.

And I guess Mike bought his 3 1k wins too.

yup 100% of winnings kept.

Clearly all his cards were live and his pots were monsters

WPT has allowed chops for the past 15 years I've played in their tournaments. I would wager a guess over 75% of their tournaments aren't played without an agreement before the last chip is won. Therefore: Chopped. Big Deal.

Seriously why the **** is this allowed? Both of these guys should be banned from poker tournaments indefinitely. This is ****ing awful on so many levels. There needs to be major backlash over this.

Right. If poker had ethics anymore these 2 clowns would be suspended from playing any WPT events moving forward. It makes a mockery of the WPT, of tournaments in general.

It's not that they've done this deal that gets me, it's the way that Leah seems so proud of his run of wins there.
Dude, you bought them. You're clearly a pathetic attention seeking POS who probably cracks one off to his own reflection.

it doesn't look good(the chip dump) but I would never throw a fit about it. They should have made it less obvious and should have done some postflop shenanigans(bet/fold) over the course of a few hands, live and learn.

How can someone feel good about winning something if they bought it? Wouldn't he feel a lot better if he had won this tourney fair and square????????????

Here is the final sequence of hands, starting with the "unscheduled break". This is just pathetic, why even bother to play out the tournament, just tell the TD what you want to do. No way they can televise this. What they heck did Leah give to Yu considering Yu had a 2-1 chip lead? 1st Place++ prize money and Leah get's title?


Heads-Up Chip Counts
The players are taking an unscheduled break.

Ryan Yu - 10,800,000 (90 bb)
Mike Leah - 4,715,000 (39 bb)


Hand #94: Mike Leah Takes the Chip Lead

Ryan Yu raises to 4,000,000 from the button on the first hand of heads-up play, Mike Leah (pictured) reraises all in for 4,695,000 from the big blind, and Yu folds.

Mike Leah - 8,735,000
Ryan Yu - 6,780,000


Hand #95: Mike Leah

Mike Leah limps in from the button, and Ryan Yu raises to 5,000,000 from the big blind.

Leah reraises all in for 8,715,000 and Yu folds.

Mike Leah - 13,755,000
Ryan Yu - 1,760,000


Hand #96: Mike Leah

Ryan Yu raises to 1,700,000 from the button, and Mike Leah (pictured) pushes all in for 13,735,000 from the big blind.

Yu folds, and Leah captures this pot.

"When you're beat, you're beat!" says Yu.

Mike Leah - 15,475,000
Ryan Yu - 40,000

Then there were a couple of automatic all-ins preflop to close it out.

If you think the money is yours, try getting it from the casino while you're still in the tournament.

The consensus here is misguided. Tournament deals are a total joke and a huge negative to the game. People just don't care about that though. People think it's a farce so they won't play and instead of thinking "hey I'd like to keep these people playing tournaments" instead it's driving people like that out of the game that we want in. There's way too much of this mindset in poker.

It should be firmly against the rules to do deals and it's a shame that's not standard everywhere. Just ban them forever if they make one.

You can chop the money prizes in a tournament and still play it out to fairly determine the champion.

Clearly that wasn't what was done here. The play was deliberately manipulated to make Leah the champion, and give him the perks and POY points associated with this position.

If this was just about the money, why not agree to a distribution of the prize pool and still play the tournament out for the trophy?

It was obviously an effort by Leah and his opponet to collude to give Leah the trophy and POY points. This. denies equity to everyone else competing for the POY title. I don't care about how players distribute money amongst themselves. But you absolutely cannot permit collusion over POY points.

#1 pays C$450k, #2 pays C$300k. You have to be a special kind of degen to want to basically play a HU freezeout for C$150k against another reg instead of just chopping it up. Who wants to have that kind of variance?

I am no fan of the standard super highroller practice of chopping it up as soon as the last recreational player is out, because that lets the recs know how little their game is respected. But chopping it heads-up reg vs. reg is super standard in all big buy-in events because taking that kind of variance is just unnecessary.

FWIW, I also hate how they did it here because it draws all kinds of unwanted attention and I don’t really get why they didn’t just play 10 hands to make it look less suspicious unless their goal was to start some kind of discussion on the subject.

At first sounded pretty slimy but after finally seeing the HHs one thing became clear.

MIke didn't believe he was doing anything out of bounds. If he did, there is no way he would have been so blatantly blatant in the last three hands.

So, I dont think one can make any judgement against him based on this news.

A separate question is should players be allowed to do this in live MTTs, when it obviously has an impact on POY standings. That's more complicated, honestly I could argue it either way.

First off, at the very least, Mike needs his POY points adjusted down to a 2nd place finish after this debacle. That would at least remove the impact upon everyone else.

I agree that they shouldn't have done this if there's a "no deals" policy in place. Like it or not, that's the policy. If you don't like the policy, don't play. You can't choose to play and then decide not to follow the rules you dislike.

As has already been pointed out, the fact that they did it so blatantly shows that neither realized what they were doing was wrong (and would look really bad), which is incredible.

Truth, honesty, ethics

These things are not complicated. They are not subject to interpretation.

He bought a place in history on a prestigious trophy. He bought a title. He bought a lifetime invitation to a winners only tournament. He did not earn these things.

Sure, the WPT ought to allow the chop. They also ought to have rules in place that when chopping, both players forfeit the $15k TOC entry (give it to charity), that the title will be declared vacant, and nobody's name will go on the trophy.

The $15k TOC is from the prizepool.

Also, while it seems the deal was discussed after the 3rd place finisher busted, what if it was discussed earlier?

Then we have two players who knew that they only needed to survive to heads-up, while everyone else thought they were playing to win it.

That's actually a fairly big strategy change, and it's not fair that only two players may have been aware of that. It's not unreasonable to believe that Mike and Ryan may have discussed the possibility of this earlier, and simply took the break to discuss how it would be accomplished.

There is no tax on gambling winnings in Canada

hold on before you start with the indictment.

Is chopping specifically against tourny rules or are tourny rules that Floor will not facilitate?

If he was being untruthful, dishonest and unethical as you imply, then he is really really bad at it. Perhaps, the world's dumbest criminal. Does not compute for me.

#FreeMike

A good article from pokerfraudalert on this subject

https://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sh...to-buy-a-title

Suggestion :
Any deals not approved by the event holder will result in the removal of title/trophy/Points (these belongs to event holder). The distribution of prize pool will be left up to the players (Players' $$)

This will also be the case if the event holder speculates any collusion, chip dumping, etc but unable to officially prove so.

Any official statement by WPT?