just read that, and while i agree a small amount of ppl prolly got screwed out of small ev i think that stars' response was pretty reasonable (not ideal but close enough that im not gonna go yelling at anyone lol).

edit: above is in reference to the 1k zoom tourney from pca.

lee posted in the 1st thread. i'd expect more from them tomorrow (which is still slower than it should be).

+1. no reason to not wait 1week. also important to not fabricate reviews so that the hotel cant try to get sites to take them down (by linking this thread etc).

Why didn't you set the thieves up? When you understood what was going on and the phone calls were coming in, surely you could let them think you were out and hide in the bathroom with the toilet scrub brush?

Agree. I actually didn't mean this should be done immediately.

But it should be done fairly soon, barring some drastic change in the situation indicative that the OP's conclusions were incorrect.

Sigh, welcome to Barcelona, incredible amounts of crime in that city. It makes sense the thieves would choose that EPT to attack.

Thanks for telling this mortifying story Jeans.

I'll be sure to never visit an EPT again.

Best of luck catching the perpetrators...

didnt have the time to read all the thread yet , so sorry if somebody said that already . Ask the people in charge to check the phone listing to your room. It was obv calls to see if you were here or not , then you can see if it comes from the hotel lobby/room service or from an other room who knew your room number. If first case its inside job if other you can know who booked that room number ?

You didn't read that thread carefully, then.

This was much more than a few players getting screwed out of a small amount of EV.

Many players were drawing almost completely dead before they played a single hand, given both the time they entered (i.e. the beginning) and the fact that people were later able to play together (a HUGE advantage).

The tournament had two problems. It was poorly conceived in the first place, and the rules were changed mid-stream.

Those that did cash (and didn't benefit from the rule change) ended up with much smaller cashes. For example, someone who finished 5th should have been 2nd, etc. Stars never made this right. They awarded the equivalent of an extra min cash value to anyone who cashed in the tournament, and everyone else got the middle finger.

I don't want to hijack this thread, so I won't enter into a long discussion about this, but the PCA ZOOM situation was indicative that:

1) Stars has idiots in important positions at these major events, who lack the basic capability to make sensible decisions on the fly.

2) Stars will occasionally sweep matters under the rug and screw players, if they feel the fallout won't be major and they can get away with it.

This situation reminded me of the PCA ZOOM because:

1) The Stars security rep completely dropped the ball, and in fact enabled the corrupt hotel staff members to manipulate the situation.

2) Stars has had very little to say about it thus far, and hopefully will not simply try to sweep this situation under the rug and ignore it.

What about looking at phone logs? If the calls for room service and hangups were coming from front desk or maybe coming from another player who has inside information on the high stake poker community who is staying in another room and just calls from a room phone.

Either way may find something if you dig.

IMO, Stars should do the following:

1) Perform an extrememly thorough investigation into the matter.

2) If the result of this investigation points to staff involvement, disassociate with this hotel forever.

3) If the behavior of the Stars security manager on site was as described, he should be fired, and all future events should be staffed with at least one intelligent, aggressive, highly competent manager.

4) Those affected by the inaction of Stars security should be compensated in some way for their trouble.

I doubt that the above will happen (except perhaps a disassociation with the hotel next year), but it really should.

cant believe they gave jeans the key codes. too easy for poker players to figure that stuff out.

Jesus CHRIST the whole we're-so-outraged tone of this thread, and the way it has progressed, is the most tilting goddam thing ever.

- PokerStars' interest and effort will be limited because they know that poker players will never take any substantial action (e.g. large-scale boycotting) that will actually hurt their business. Stars survived Black Friday -- they will survive whatever bad publicity comes with "laptop theft."

- And the Arts/Ritz Carleton is a subsidiary of Marriott International, a $12 billion company that employs 127,000 people total--38,000 of whom work at Ritz properties. I'm certain they are well aware that, given the sheer number of people who work for them, and those employees' borderline unfettered access to guests' private property, there is no way to prevent these sorts of things from happening altogether. They are obviously not thrilled, they'll try to compensate you with free stuff. But they will certainlynever go out of their way to help you meddle in corporate internal affairs, and have every reason to deny you access to information that will, for sure, help you find out who stole your laptop, but also may expose their own employees as well.

- As for the police, national police, or whatever--these organizations respond to clout. The Marriott has the most, PokerStars has far less but still some, and individual poker players have next to none. I hope that the police figure out what's going on and take some real steps to prevent it in the future, but I'm not optimistic.

Threads like this one are a frustrating indication that the poker community is full of very smart people, who like getting to the bottom of things, are sympathetic to each other, and will read 4,500 word OPs in a heartbeat it's a subject they care about.

But poker players, myself included, are also horrifically bad at collectively doing anything, or even grasping how important it is to have powerful organization with your interests at heart. It's all well and good to joke about being lazy, or to diss the PPA (who I have no involvement with), but this is one of the situations where it comes back to bite us all.

What would actually prevent these things from happening is pooling a lot of money into a lobbying organization or, hell, forming an additional, well-funded one (national/international/whatever) that can actually influence decisions of the Marriott, the DOJ, Congress, etc. Show that there are some bottom-line, profit-hurting repercussions for PokerStars for stuff that is going on at the Arts.

But I cannot imagine that happening. Maybe that's just a function of the fundamentally weird relationship between poker players and money.

But talking about how outrageous this is going to fall on very, very deaf ears to those who are actually in a position to do something about it. And this whole situation's real purpose will probably ultimately be to serve as a very enlightening and unfortunate cautionary tale. Also, looks like some very good advice ITT about laptop security tips.

KANU: I hope you put a knee through that laptop that you brought for that EPT-visit once just to make sure you never use it for something important ever.

ever.

It's a couple of bigs, that peace of mind are worth so much more.

Forming a large, effective organization is tough, especially from a funding standpoint. The PPA only got off the ground because Stars and Tilt poured a fortune into it.

I would love to see some sort of "poker players' rights" organization with a large membership. It would have clout and could organize boycotts of shady companies screwing us.

Hell, I would even volunteer my time to help lead such an organization.

But it's a lot easier said than done.

Anyway, Pokerstars does not like bad PR, so as long as this issue is continuously pressed, and answers are demanded, Stars will hopefully be forced into giving some satisfactory answers.

Right now, they've been eerily silent, and they're looking quite guilty of brutal incompetence here.

They actually had a lot of power in this situation. They could have held their large contract with Arts over their head, and threatened to completely pull out in future years if this was not immediately solved.

Stars' security could have demanded answers that made sense and required evidence to back it up. If Pokerstars really communicated to Jeans that "the hotel changed their view about the cameras", it is absolutely sickening. Pokerstars should have been all over the hotel regarding their ever-changing stories regarding the cameras, rather than trumpeting their success in getting the hotel to "change their view" about their previous lie.

Stars should have put their foot down and demanded an immediate resolution with full transparency, with the threat of completely abandoning Arts in future years if this did not happen. And they should have followed through with this threat if it did not occur.

Also, this is a situation where time is of the essence. Once you give the criminals a chance to hide evidence, plant new false evidence, and rehearse cover stories among the guilty parties, you lose the ability to prove wrongdoing.

The time for Stars to get this right has already passed, and now it might even be too late to ever find out what really happened.

Scary

Putting pressure.

Reviews, MANY of them, is a good way to get attention and be taken seriously.
Tell the world, and get help from virtual assistants in Asia if needed. Make sure your reviews become the most helpful ones and most read.

Sh-t like this should be out there in the open for any potential hotel customer to read.

Examples:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Rev...a.html#REVIEWS

http://uk.hotels.com/ho126367/hotel-...spain/#reviews

+all the others hotel/review sites out there

A thread on 2p2 won´t reach their customer base or make people responsible care. This all becoming public knowledge will

I agree with you 100% there. Sure the situation is not great. But instead of joining the rant I offered a possible solution a few pages back. No one is really commenting on it though. But until I hear different, I think it's a good idea. *shrugz*

Looks like this hotel was having similar issues back in 2010:

Reviewed February 2, 2010
Shocking, but true. This hotel has a problem. We went to breakfast, where one provides the room number to be admitted to breakfast area. Whilst there, our room was accessed with a duplicate key and emptied of laptop, 2 cameras, hard drive, 2 cellphones, and the the high res pictures of our marriage and safari trip. Doesn't take much to do the math as to what exactly is going on.
Upon notifying management of the robbery, no one - not anyone - bothered to come to see us in our room until we went down and demanded it, more than 20 minutes later.
The event wasn't treated with the seriousness it deserved until Ritz Carlton corporate got involved. Eventually, we were compensated for our stolen items. But not our stolen memories.

This issue definitely deserves a proper full response from Stars on here.

Seems to me that everybody is looking at the security guy, or looking for a legitimate cinematic conspiracy. Criminals are for the most part pretty dumb, and not too smart, though. The front desk personnel are the most likely suspects here, imo.

Someone trolling a hallway calls someone out on the street who walks in and says "room 223" now. She or he has a good workable card for them in 15 seconds. If there is no obvious cash or valuables, trojan the laptop. (furthermore, they can just target laptops, as 20 incidents of stolen valuables in one night will lead to them being fingered quickly, while identity theft crimes are really hard to trace to a point of infection, and are time-variable).

Two poker players being hit during a poker event is no unbelievable coincidence. There may be as many as 50 rooms being hit a night if just one front desk person is compromised.

And it is probably true that the cards are corrupted easily. All the better for the insiders, as that log demonstrates, as an investigation will literally need sherlock holmes on the case in order to solve it.

The security guy? He knows his hotel isn't safe. He knows a not-insignificant number of his coworkers are corrupt and running cons, and he's just trying to save his job.

Hope I'm wrong, though. Because if this is some high-level s***, you have a better chance of getting to the bottom of it than if it is some street-level con artists.

Wtf?
Its the job of the security guy to make sure his hotel is safe.
Its his job to have working cameras
Its his job to provide video evidence if you/pokerstars staff/the police want to look at the tape around the time those entries happened.
Is his job to make sure nobody gets the keycard of yourroom or be able to enter it.

99.99% chance that the security people are at least involved in that

Incredible story, longest post I've read on 2+2 and worth the read!

I guess it's fortunate that the hackers were stupid enough to return OP's laptop after all, even though from the story it sounds like they should have realized that it was very likely that OP would have noticed that his laptop was gone briefly.
Suppose they just kept the laptop or dumped it. It would have looked like a simple laptop theft and the bigger ploy would never have been suspected, let alone investigated.

+1 Alex, obviously this is a horrible situation and it is pretty poor how stars has gone about it so far, but I think the one of main concerns after solving the cases in this hotel is safeguarding future EPT's from this happening, I definitely like the idea of laptop lockboxes and when I am next traveling I will certainly look into this. Has anyone thought of the possibility that a worker for stars could have gotten involved in the shady activity? The fact that this has happened at previous EPT stops, ie with Seiver at Berlin is concerning, there would definitely need to be contacts in the form of hotel workers and someone involved with poker for this to happen.

I would also be willing to bet that this group has succeeded in hacking many poker players laptops not just in Barca but on other EPT stops, so anyone that has been at these tournaments and has ANY doubts, get it checked out ASAP

Is honestly answering people who phone you asking when you will be out really a common thing? That seems like an extremely alarming sign someone is planning on burglarizing you. If I received a call like that I would report it to the hotel immediately.

Not that it would have mattered in this case, it seems