Didja Hear?

You probably heard the news about how in late October Chris Vaughn of Bluff Magazine had pulled off the amazing feat of winning the Full Tilt $1 Million Guaranteed and the PokerStars Sunday Million in back-to-back weeks. After having spent time covering poker players, Vaughn had suddenly become the interviewee, being featured over on PokerNews and appearing on Scott Huff and Haralabos Voulgaris’s podcast Big Poker Sundays (the 11/18/07 episode).

You might have also heard how last week Full Tilt decided to take Vaughn’s prize money away for the $1 Million Guaranteed victory and award it to second-place finisher Soren Kongsgaard. In a post over on 2+2, Kongsgaard shared the email sent to him by Full Tilt in which it was explained he had been “among the victims of one player using more than one Full Tilt account in the tournament.” The email goes on to say how “Late into the tournament, a player who had already been eliminated took over the account of a player who was still in, which is against our tournament rules.”

Interestingly, Voulgaris had explicitly asked Vaughn about the possibility that his account might have been “ghosted” (i.e., that another player, perhaps his backer, had taken over for him during one or both of the tourneys), and Vaughn denied any such shenanigans took place. He and Huff talked more about the controversy during last night’s show (the 12/2/07 episode), having Shane “Shaniac” Schleger on to discuss the various ethical issues raised by the incident.

During the discussion with Schleger, Scott Huff happens to mention Hard-Boiled Poker, particularly referring to a post in which I talked a bit about his having played some Omaha Hi/Lo on Full Tilt under Gavin Smith’s account. In that post, I characterized the Huff-Smith incident as really more a matter of etiquette than ethics, saying “If Gavin Smith wants to let Scott Huff play under his name, so be it. And if Smith occasionally instructs Huff when to check-raise, that doesn’t seem to violate any specific rule.”

Anyhow, if you happened to have heard Big Poker Sundays this week and ended up here as a result, here’s that there post to which Huff refers: “Focus on Ethics” (3/1/07).

And do check out Big Poker Sundays -- always interesting & entertaining. Even when they aren’t talking about HBP.

(EDIT [added 12/5/07]: For more on the matter, see John Caldwell’s Poker News interview [Part 1 & Part 2] with Vaughn and Sorel "Imper1um" Mizzi -- the person who took over Vaughn’s account late in the Full Tilt $1 Million Guaranteed -- in which the pair are stunningly frank in admitting their wrongdoing.)