Sacreblue!

When is a guarantee not a guarantee? When the Partouche Group use it as a marketing ploy to get people to their poker tournament and then renege on the deal.

This barely believable scenario unfolded in the glare of the world’s poker media in September at the French casino group’s flagship main event in Cannes. The grand final of the season’s tour no less.

The main event had been advertised all over the place as having a €5 million guaranteed prize pool. But when the final numbers were in and the prize pool fell over €700,000 short of the guarantee with no mention was made about topping it up, players started to get worried.

They took to social media, they talked to journalists, they asked questions and they hurriedly grabbed screenshots from around the web where the guarantee was mentioned.
Partouche said there was no guarantee. Indeed the company took the unusual step of removing the paragraph where it was mentioned from its website but Google cached the text and it was plain for all to see as the first result on its search engine when searching for Partouche Poker Tour.

It backfired massively of course but not before Patrick Partouche, chairman of the Partouche Group, claimed there was no guarantee and took a swipe at ungrateful players.

Overnight Partouche marketing main man JJ Ichai offered to resign but Partouche returned the next day, said he would not accept any resignation and reinstated the guarantee saying that information had come to light that had not been made available to him previously.

Overall it was one of the most bizarre incidents in the modern game.

But was it a monumental miscommunication or borderline scam? We’ll probably never know the truth but the players got their money in the end after kicking up an almighty fuss.

However it will certainly leave a sour taste in the mouths of players, observers and commentators who felt they had been taken for a ride.

Poker has received bad enough press in the last 18 months without one of the biggest players in one of the biggest markets indulging in what, at best, could be described as opportunistic sharp practice and, at worst, outright attempted fraud.

The entire debacle should also serve as a reminder to everyone in the industry that news can spread like wildfire in this age of instant communication and to take for granted the media and the communications platforms people have access to is folly in the extreme.

Here’s hoping Partouche hasn’t done itself lasting damage in its home market and the whole sorry affair does not have knock on effects for upcoming French poker events. ♠