WSOP organisers have decided to deny Jesse Yaginuma a prestigious gold bracelet after concluding that he and James Carroll engaged in collusion during their heads-up battle.
However, both players will still receive all monies due for their relative results.
A statement from the WSOP said:
“The investigation into WSOP Event 53 has been completed. We have concluded that in order to uphold the integrity of the game and to uphold our official WSOP Tournament Rules, no winner will be recognized and no bracelet will be awarded for this year’s tournament. The remaining prize pool will be split between the final two players.”
Is This a Fair Result?
For those who haven’t followed the whole story from the beginning, Jesse Yaginuma was eligible to win an extra $1 million from a ClubWPT Gold promotion if he won the $1,500 buy-in Millionaire Maker event.
The problem was that he entered the heads-up finale with a 9-1 chip deficit. What transpired after the match got going was a steady flow of chips over to Yaginuma from Carroll, to the point where the rail just didn’t believe that what they were seeing was real play.
There was no hard evidence, of course, but the fans made enough noise where the WSOP organisers had to get involved.
But this was another problem: they say that no press is bad press, but in this case it would only end up being a slew of negative publicity. Nobody would win.
WSOP rules are clear that chip dumping is prohibited but both players insisted that nothing untoward had been going on.
This clearly threatened to open up a can of worms if a double disqualification was thrown at the pair. As the WSOP is effectively a dictatorship, no standard of proof exists; it’s up to them.
Having a rival series — the World Poker Tour — offering an extra $1 million in prize money turned out to be a bit of a stinker. Looking at it from the other side, what did anyone expect to happen here? That amount of money was always going to influence the players’ decisions, even if no backroom deal was agreed between them.
So, all in all, this outcome does really appear to have been the best way forward. The WSOP saves face by denying Jesse Yaginuma a fourth bracelet, and his first in a live event, and the players receive the official prizes of $1,255,180 and $1,012,320.
The players must have also been sweating a little at the thought of a potential ban from WSOP events. That might have been overkill but the possibility was still there.
