The ClubWPT Gold promo tiff: player bans become corporate response by proxy
The fallout from the end of the WSOP's Millionaire Maker event finds both players banned from the WSOP and all Caesars properties, while the Milly Maker ends with no official winner.
There have been a few hundred takes on the conclusion of the 2025 Wor;d Series of Poker’s Millionaire Maker event, in which Jesse Yaginuma overcame a 9:1 deficit against James Carroll during heads-up play to end up with all the chips, what was officially a $1.25 million payday, and a million-dollar bonus offered by a rival online site ClubWPT Gold.
That a deal of some sort was reached before heads-up play began was evident to many observers, and the WSOP immediately announced that the action between Yaginuma and Carroll was under review. Within a couple of days, the WSOP voided what would have been Yaginuma’s fourth bracelet win.
The WSOP seemingly found no evidence of collusion between Yaginuma and Carroll prior to heads-up play, and since the two players were alreasy assured of a combined $2.67 million, the WSOP voided the action and split the remianing prize money between the two. The WSOP also declared that both players finished second while withholding the bracelet normally awarded to an event’s winner.
Yaginuma and Carroll were also reportedly banned for life from the WSOP and all Caesars properties. Such things are not officially announced in most cases, but neither player has cashed anywhere in Las Vegas since the Millionaire Maker, for som anecdotal evidene suporting th ban. And as for ClubWPT, that site has announced that it will honor Yaginuma’s win regardless and has paid the million to him.
How Yaginuma and Carroll split up the total of $3.67 million, including the bonus, hasn’t leaked out. Whether ClubWPT was thrilled to pay out the million isn’t known, but if the site hadn’t, the poker world would have rained down some hell on all things WPT. And that’s part of this tale, because while ClubWPT Gold is part of the WPT family, it has new ownership that no longer answers on all matters to the rest of the WPT family.
Skanky promotion for sure
Let’s be frank about some things. This was an ill-conceived promotion, to award such a huge bonus to a winner on a rival platform. That’s the type of thing that garbage offshore sites have pulled for decades, and if the rumors I’ve heard are true, the new primary owner of ClubWPT Gold is a native of China who has previously operated at least a couple of such international, low-integrity online gambling sites.
While that speaks significantly to the chances that the entire WPT family is again cash-poor, it’s also worth noting that I’d doubt WPT boss Adam Pliska is behind the promo; it’s far more likely that he and the main WPT operation have been swirled into this mess.
And if this is how ClubWPT Gold chooses to conduct itself, that speaks volumes, too. My friend Lee Jones termed the saga as “industrial sabotage”, and that’s probably an accurate description.
Also, don’t forget that behind the WSOP curtain, it’s GGPoker pulling the strings. In terms of providing online poker to Americans, they are now heated rivals, with ClubWPT Gold now in direct competition with GG’s ClubGGPoker. Despite my personal belief that most sweeps-based sites will be gone in under a decade, it might be wise to consider this as an online-sweeps turf war that spilled over into the live WSOP scene. This saga, the promo and the bans, are perhps more properly seen as an exchange of volleys between ClubWPT Gold and Club GGPoker. The players themselves are almost pawns in the matter; this situation was likely to arise and most higher-stakes, I believe, would have taken advantage of the moment.
As for Yaginuma and Carroll receiving that banhammer, the consensus is that the penalties are just. The WSOP does not officially allow chops, though they are very commonplace under the table. The problem was Yaginuma taking down all the chips in action that included some strange hands, all while his potential bonus was widely known.
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Incentivized to cheat
As Jones pointed out in a recent video, if you incentivize players to cheat, many will do exactly that. That’s why ClubWPT Gold’s promo was in such poor form and bad corporate taste. Behind the ownership and management scene at the WPT, I’d suspect that there are strained relationships amid plenty of heated words. While some folks believe all publicity is good publicity, this saga is brand-damaging.
The million dollars is a huge incentive, too. All that said, it’s not even close to the biggest chip dump at the end of a major live tourney. That claim still goes to the 2018 WPT Fallsview main event, where Ryan Yu had more than a 2:1 lead over Mike Leah, heads-up, when the two took a brief, unscheduled break.
After they returned, Yu dumped almost all his chips to Leah in three hands, in grossly blatant fashion. Please visit Todd Witteles’s PFA post on it from back then to see how gross itt was. Leah needed the win to boost his points total to improve his chances of winning the WPT’s annual Player of the Year honor, which included, if I remember, a financial or complimentary-buyins component.
Did Leah act unethically? Of course he did, whether he and Leah technically had the right to chop the remaining prize money as they wished. This is just one major example, too. There have been many others.
Millionaire Maker action before heads-up
One thing about the recent Milly Maker controversy is that the only collusion between Yaginuma and Carroll seems to be whatever happened after they reached heads-up play. There don’t seem to be any accusations out there that the soft-played each other before that time, and I believe the fifth-place finisher, Jeffrey Tanouye, has gone on public record as saying he believed everything was on the up-and-up while he was at the table.
After that, with the incentive ever increasing, who knows? If I’d been the WSOP, I’d have been looking more closely at the three-handed action then at whatever took place heads-up. Formidable Circuit regular Josh Reichard finished third in the Milly, in case you wondered. By splitting first- and second-place money between Yaginuma and Carroll, the WSOP is also saying, without putting any formal words behind it, is that they believe (or couldn’t come close to proving) that anything hinky occurred before the Milly’s original conclusion.
Just another day in the high-stakes tourney world, right?