Just The Facts!

McClelland's Take on the Festa al Lago Uproar

What was all the uproar about during this year's Festa al Lago Tournament at Bellagio?

To find out, we asked the man who knows exactly what happened, tournament director Jack McClelland. During his 15 years as TD for the World Series, McClelland earned a reputation for fairness, and Jack says he is always "tweaking" his tournaments to make them better.

The problem occurred during the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold'em main event. Several players came to him and were concerned about chip dumping and collusion. For example, when two players working together face off, intentionally or by chance, one of them can lose or "dump" his chips to the other, allowing a quick and easy double-up for one player that might give him a big edge. Another from of collusion is when a player will "soft play," for example, fail to bet or raise when expected so as not to cost a partner money. A classic form of collusion is "whipsawing," when partners raise and reraise each other to trap players in-between or force folds.

McClelland tries to minimize the possibility of collusion by redrawing tables at certain intervals during the event. Jack recalls what happened at the Festa al Lago championship event.

"It was getting down close to the money and some players complained that people were stalling and soft-playing each other and that there could be some collusion going on. What I decided to do, in case anybody was trying to do this, was to surprise the players. We were paying 100 spots. When we got down to 11 tables, which was 99, every time we broke a table, I wanted them to redraw for seats. That way you keep shuffling the players up so nobody gets to play together for a long period of time. If somebody and his friend are at the same table for eight hours, they can make maneuvers. If you're only there for an hour or two, you're not going to give them that opportunity.

"We always change seats during a tournament. Normally, at one table outside of the money, we start redrawing. For instance, if I pay 50 places, we redraw at 54, 45, 36, 27, 18 and 10. If I pay 27 places, we redraw at 36, 27, 18 and 10. So, that was basically what I was doing here and it probably would have been fine except for Mike Matusow. You know he's loud and opinionated. He started screaming at the top of his lungs, 'Jack McClelland finally went senile on us. Why does he keep changing the seats? All this fooling around is making me crazy.

"He got a half dozen guys stirred up. So, what we did was, after we got down to 90 players, we just went ahead and went down to the 54 and redrew at 45, 36, 27, 18 and 10. A lot of people saw nothing wrong. I was trying to please the players, which I wanted to do to start with because of the concern about collusion, but a lot of people are paranoid. They think if they lose, it has to be somebody else's fault. It can't be them, they're geniuses. It's either a dealer's fault, the other player's fault or my fault. Really, I don't really think collusion is a big problem in poker tournaments today." What happened to "The Mouth?" He finished in the money. The winner was a 23-year-old Norwegian poker pro, Andreas Walnum, who outlasted 400 players over five days. He took home $1,090,025 and a $25,000 seat at the 2007 WPT Championship.