During the recent European Poker Tour Grand Final festival, poker professional Justin Bonomo was one of the fortunate individuals who was able to take some gold away from the proceedings. In the €2000 No Limit Hold’em preliminary event on May 2, he was able to defeat a field of 346 players to capture slightly more than €110,000 (roughly $125,000 U. S. dollars) for his victory. It wasn’t Bonomo’s actions during the tournament that drew attention, however, but his initial refusal afterwards to pose for any promotional press photography that has drawn the ire of some in the business.
As documented by Lee Davy with CalvinAyre.com, Bonomo and the PokerStars brass (the people behind the EPT) battled back and forth before Bonomo took the less-than-excited “winner’s photo.” This seemed to ignite further controversy as to whether Bonomo was actually going far enough with his protests and Davy also chimed in with his thoughts on the matter. “Complaining about the way PokerStars treats its customers and then playing on the site because you need the money…is passing responsibility,” Davy wrote. “There’s a lot of money in the world. There’s a lot of ways to get ahold of it. PokerStars doesn’t hold the near-monopoly on all of it.”
It seems that Bonomo has finally had enough of being everyone’s punching bag. In his own lengthy diatribe on TwitLonger, Bonomo responds to the critics – including Davy – regarding their positions on whether he was right in what he did during the Grand Final. Apparently Bonomo attempted to post it as a response to Davy’s piece at the website but was denied by the moderators of the site. As such, Bonomo put it out over TwitLonger.
“(Davy’s article) does not mention why I believe PokerStars is unworthy of good-faith promotional work,” Bonomo begins. “Over the course of 15 years, Isai Scheinberg turned it into a multi-billion-dollar company by taking care of the customers and marketing the dream of being a professional poker player. When Amaya and David Baazov purchased the company, they flushed this vision down the toilet.”
“It would be one thing if I was just mad at them for poor business decisions,” Bonomo continued. “I believe they are drastically hurting their long term bottom line with the constant rake increases and cutting back on player perks. But it’s more than that.” Bonomo then goes into the dissolution of the SuperNova Elite program, explaining that players such as himself paid around $180,000 in rake to receive approximately $120,000 in rewards. “We had a financial transaction. I paid them…and they did not give me what I paid for. This is fraud and theft.” (It bears noting that, without any regulatory oversight, players have no recourse for legal relief.)
Bonomo, who has been a success on both the virtual and physical baize for more than a decade, then opines on PokerStars’ ethics as a company. “Nowadays, PokerStars isn’t doing shit for the professional poker players,” Bonomo declared. “They are actively defrauding us and cutting back every single benefit from the past they could find. I believe it’s in the players’ best interest to make a stand and say, “In the past, we used our images, our voices and our social media presence to help you out. This was a ‘you pat our backs, we pat yours’ situation. If you’re no longer willing to give us anything in return, then we are no longer going to give you that publicity for free.”
It is a delicate balance between the tournaments, online poker sites and other organizations looking to promote themselves and taking care of the players appropriately. As Bonomo notes earlier in his treatise, there was a day when the online sites paid players handsomely for making final tables and wearing the regalia; nowadays, according to Bonomo, those payments have disappeared. When it comes to such things as media obligations, however, normally those things are written into any player release forms that are signed by participants; it isn’t as easy to just not sign these documents because, if left unsigned, in theory a tournament can remove you from the tables and not allow you to play.
With the World Series of Poker on the horizon, will there be any protests along the lines of Bonomo’s against the EPT and PokerStars? Will there be a discussion of the “player’s rights” in the overall scheme of the poker industry? If nothing else, Bonomo’s actions have asked some questions we all need to consider.
