“Drama” was the word of the moment in the poker world last week. Shaun Deeb needed went into the final day of the WSOP Europe Colossus event needing to finish fifth to win the 2019 World Series of Poker Player of the Year award, but when he was eliminated in eleventh place, that honor went to Daniel Negreanu for the third time in his career. Then, on Friday, it was discovered that Negreanu had accidentally been credited with a cash during this summer’s WSOP in Las Vegas and thus had more POY points than he should have had. After an investigation, the WSOP made it official: Daniel Negreanu lost those points and Robert Campbell is now the WSOP Player of the Year.
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
In a statement posted on Twitter, the World Series of Poker explained what happened. As one would expect, there is a person who works for the WSOP who manually inputs the tournament results in a database/system/what-have-you. When that person uploaded places 32-46 for Event #87, he or she also inadvertently copied them into Event #68, overwriting the existing records for that event.
Thus, Negreanu and 14 other players were awarded points for Event #68 that they should not have been given. Those additional 213.1 points helped elevated Negreanu to the Player of the Year title.
The World Series of Poker listed the corrected POY rankings as follows:
Robert Campbell – 3,961.31
Shaun Deeb – 3,917.32
Daniel Negreanu – 3,861.76
Anthony Zinno – 3,322.00
WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart expressed his regrets, saying:
We’d like to offer our sincere and public apology to those players who chased the award. It is an amazing thing when poker players pursue history and a sense of sporting honor, and thus it’s a terrible embarrassment for us to stain a great race for the title. We’re going to take the next few months to overhaul the POY and many of our procedures that have gone off course.
He added that the WSOP has reached out to those most affected by the mistake.
Players’ reactions a mixed bag
Daniel Negreanu, who moved from first to third, said that he spoke with the WSOP’s Seth Palansky about the situation and came away satisfied. He said that he is not upset, that mistakes happen.
Shaun Deeb, on the other hand, was livid upon hearing about the data entry error. Deeb moved up to second, but for him, the frustration comes from what he would have done differently had he known the correct standings.
As Earl Burton pointed out this weekend, Deeb thought he needed to finish fifth in the Colossus, but really only needed to place ninth. He ended up in eleventh place, just shy of the mark. Had he known, he might have changed his strategy to try to stay alive a couple more spots to nab the POY crown.
“I’m in shock and really frustrated time to check all my cashes and see if they missed any I know there was a 1500 6m that was missing from 25k fantasy for a while,” Deeb tweeted on Friday.
He went on to accuse Negreanu of cheating (it seems like he believes that Negreanu, someone who pushes hard to win POY every year, knew that the points weren’t correct, yet didn’t say anything) and suggested that he and Campbell share the award:
