As most of you know, I just finished 3rd in the Pokerstars Baltic Festival which the Stars pro William Thorson won. As an added bonus there was an EPT Tallinn package for the best finisher wearing Stars gear. This additional bonus in the prize pool was everywhere from flyers they gave at the casino to their website: http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/prom...ival/schedule/

They also kept mentioning this to satellite qualifiers and pretty much everyone wore Stars gear for this added value. While it doesn't say anywhere exactly that the race does include their team pros, imo this campaign was made only to ensure that everyone and especially the qualifiers wear Stars clothes.

Their pros (I think the only ones in were Martin Horecki, Ville Wahlbeck and William Thorson but there could've been others, definitely not many though) all already had a package as Stars are buying them in and therefore I don't see why they should be in the promotion.

I asked the tournament director with about 13 people left on a break about how many players in the Stars promotion are still in. She looked at the list, and said "not too many, as the lithuanians are wearing their own shirt, I think only you and xxx and xxx and xxxx and xxxx, you're looking good as you cover all of them!". She mentioned every other player still in the competition by name but did NOT mention William.

 I only spoke to the TD about this before starting the FT as the manager was nowhere in sight, and it didn't cross my mind William could possibly be in this competition. You know, it's one of those situations where the answer just seems so clear I didn't feel like going to search him for a second opinion, especially as I already got the TD's word for it. There was a 60min dinner break before the start of the FT, and I was gone for about 55 minutes of it meditating and eating dinner. When I got back there 5 minutes before the start, the manager wasn't there and therefore I didn't really even have a chance to ask him. Admittedly, had I decided to go for it, I would probably have found him just in time as he was still in the same room, but I had no idea of his whereabouts at the time. He sure as hell wasn't present in the final table ceremonies. He was in the exact opposite end of this very large room in a cash game table.

Then when I finally ran into the Stars manager with the ft being halfway through and after several "wrong" decisions given the actual ICM situation I was in, he was visibly drunk playing cash. I tried to argue this on a 10-minute break, but he didn't want to discuss any of my points (basically the one stated in this thread apart from the .net/.com issue which I didn't know at the time) and seemed like he wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible. His answer to all of my arguments was basically "yeah but William is eligible as he plays for Pokerstars" and he refused to comment more on it.


The FT included me, three other qualifiers and William Thorson. Two random qualifiers got knocked out 1st and 2nd and I thought I was HU against the other guy for the EPT seat as it didn't even cross my mind William would be in the race too. It heavily affected my decisions and made me play tighter as the prize money for 6th (=when we reached the situation with only two stars qualifiers left) was about 14k and the package value is 5 or 6k. I covered the other guy by quite a bit so I had to slow down considerably to not make any icm disasters. At this point the average was like 20-24BBs due to a turbo structure so not being able to 3bet shove light was actually quite disturbing.

When the last guy finally got knocked out 5th I was certain I had won the seat, only to find out that I'd still have to beat William? I obv failed to do this and got $0 for the promotion.

Lastly, the rules say that all players wearing a Pokerstars.com logo are eligible for the campaign. It doesn't say just Pokerstars, it says Pokerstars.com.

William was wearing Pokerstars.net througout the tournament (see picture), as do all the team pros I believe. I was wearing Pokerstars.com and this is easily provable based on the pictures taken there that are all over the internet. This would be kind of stupid if I were facing another qualifier who was wearing .net for some reason and I certainly won't be making a case of it, but there's a good chance that they wanted to make a difference between .net and .com for the exact reason pros couldn't take part in the campaign and the manager just wasn't informed or something.

The diffence between .net and .com is that .net is the one where you play for play money and .com is the real deal. In the legislation of a lot of european countries you're not allowed to advertise .com in your gear because it's gambling for real money, and Stars and other sites came up with .net to go around that problem. The reason William and other pros have .net in their shirts is that in half of the countries they play in they are only allowed to advertise .net, and to ensure no one accidentally plays in .com in a wrong country to avoid being sued etc they probably just decided it's safer to make the pros wear .net all the time.

What does that have to do with the Baltic Fest, where advertising .com is allowed too? Well I can't think of a single reason why they'd want to write "Pokerstars.com patch" instead of "Pokerstars patch" in their rules, but to exactly exclude their pros from the promotion. All the satellite qualifiers and other people who chose to wear Stars gear to take part in the promo were given .com shirts, but the pros wore .net.

So William winning this clearly broke almost every rule in the Stars campaign, but here's the best part... The rules strictly say that you are NOT allowed to transfer or sell your seat. If you win it, you simply have to keep it. I asked the Stars manager about this, and he confirmed that William would simply have two seats but he could only use one of them. Still they wouldn't give it to me, there would just be an empty seat at the EPT adding money to the prize pool but no one would playing on it.

However, I heard later that William had made some kind of a deal with Stars to give the package to his brother who was rooting for him at the FT. So he first broke all the rules, and to reward that Stars also let him transfer the seat to his brother. Nice going, Stars!

PS. I'd like to point out that I'm not accusing William of anything and he has obviously done nothing wrong. I don't think he even knew about the whole promotion until I made a scene about it with the Stars manager and he just chose to give it to his brother when he was given the chance.

I'm seriously considering boycotting the next EPT season over this. There's a long thread about this in the 2+2 MTT Community area, where pretty much everyone agrees with me that I was totally screwed here. If you'd like to express your support to me, the thread is here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61/mtt-community/i-lost-last-longest-stars-team-pro-they-being-classless-not-giving-me-ept-seat-811430/index5.html