The Florida Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering recently announced it will investigate the Hialeah Park Casino regarding a poker tournament held there August 25-30. In an email to Nick Sortal of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, regulators at the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation wrote, “The Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering is aware of the potential issue with a Hialeah Poker tournament and is gathering information.” Hialeah Park officials responded, “Hialeah Park Management became aware of the alleged incident through social media. An internal investigation of the matter found no evidence of any discrepancies in the manner in which the poker tournament was conducted nor any wrongdoing on the part of any of the poker staff.”
The tournament, celebrating the poker room’s second anniversary, was a $250 buy-in event with a guaranteed prize pool of $200,000 and a first place prize guaranteed at $60,000. Five Day Ones from August 25-29 offered two flights each day to attract enough players to make the guarantee. Along with the original buy-in of 15,000 chips, a $20 donation to the dealer pool bought another 5,000 chips, and another $20 donation purchased 8,000 more chips as an add-on.
Reportedly things went well until the final day of the tournament, when players began to note certain discrepancies. On the Two Plus Two forum, a post by “Bob Bernstein” stated the numbers Hialeah Park officials gave for the start of Day Two play–a prize pool of $215,002 and 163 players still in the event–did not match up with the numbers on the tournament clock at the event, with an alleged difference of 696,000 chips in play, far beyond anything that could be blamed on color-ups, pulling dead stacks and so on.
A poker room shift manager attempted to explain the discrepancies on Facebook, providing yet a third set of numbers which allegedly did not match the previous two. When the final table was reached, all 10 players agreed to a chop. No information about the tournament or its results was published by the poker room.
Some posters on the Two Plus Two thread encouraged Bernstein to contact Florida gaming officials about the situation. The officials would not comment on how they were alerted to the Hialeah Park complaint.
According to Sortal, the Hialeah Park poker room offers 33 tables and brought in more than $8.3 million in the last fiscal year, making it the largest poker room in the Miami area.
