What happens when the government runs a Swedish Championship…

In Sweden we have monopoly on lottery. This means the only one who are allowed to run any kind of lottery in Sweden is the Swedish government and they are. They have lotteries, they have a casino (four actually), they have ATG where you can gamble on horses, soccer etc, they have slot machines and a lot of other “money machines” which gives them huge profits every year. They also have a poker site called Svenska Spel. This site is only open for Swedish players and is based on the Boss Media network (but you can’t play against anyone else than the ones logged into Svenska Spel).

The last four years we’ve had a Swedish poker federation who has been the ones who arranged the Swedish championship. First it was only live poker but nowadays we also have it online. Each year they let all the interested poker sites do a purchase. The one with the best offer gets to run the championship. Normally this is the site that can offer the best guaranteed prize pool that benefits all the players. The live championship we can’t have in Sweden so since two years ago we’ve had it in Tallinn, Estonia. Before this was held on a poker club in Stockholm called “Klubben”.

As you can see from the above we already had a Swedish championship but this didn’t stop Svenska Spel from arranging their own one. Of course this made a lot of people upset since we now have so many Swedish champions that it doesn’t even feel like a status to get. The Swedish poker federation sued Svenska Spel earlier this year since they we’re first to have a SM (=Swedish Championship). Svepof (the poker federation) already had the trademark trespass and the lawsuit is processed. What happens there the future will tell.

The tournament online last week showed how incompetent Svenska Spel is and with 21 players left the software couldn’t handle all the railbirds and collapsed. Two of the 21 players got kicked out and got blinded away. This was at 21:29 at night. Nothing happened, they (Svenska Spel) didn’t pause the tournament and it continued almost another hour.

One hour later they were 15 players left and now Svenska Spel decided to pause the tournament and start an investigation of what happened. They sent out a press release saying they would look into the problems and hoped the tournament could continue the day after. Another day went by. On Monday morning they sent out a new email saying they hadn’t found a solution to the problem but hoped the tournament could continue the day after this.

The next morning comes and this is when the big mess starts. Svenska Spel sends out a press release saying that they wont continue the tournament and the 21 (not the remaining 15 players but the 21) would split the money based on their chips when 21 players remained.

For anyone who has ever played poker and knows a little bit of math this is very wrong. First of all this meant that players who were short stacked with 21 players but still were in when they were down to 15 would lose a lot of money. One of the players had around average when 21 remained but was chip second when they broke the tournament with 15. He lost 20 000 Euros (200k SEK). Another one was in 20th spot with 21 but survived and 14th when they stopped it. He lost around 6000 Euros. The happy six players who already had busted out got more money than people still in the tournament… as you can see this is way wrong and out of the line.

Svenska Spel is now hiding behind the Swedish law. They say they cannot give compensation in this case and the most integral thing to do in this situation is to turn back the time and go with their stacks with 21 players remaining. They don’t lose a single crown in this big mess that they created. Their reputation is now even worse than it was before but they still made a lot of money on the tournament and continues to make a lot of money on their little site.
As well as the issues with the money there is the issue that Svenska Spel arranged a Swedish Championship and didn’t continue the tournament until we had a champion in it. It’s worst than bad. It’s derision to all the participants in the tournament.

They said their servers can take up to 20 000 players at the same time. When their servers started to act weird and kicked people out there wasn’t even 5000 logged in. Now they excuse themselves by saying “we couldn’t imagine this much interest in the tournament”. Most of the logged in players weren’t even playing at this time only watching the resolution of the tournament.
First they arrange a tournament called a championship when we already have our champions since Unibet had the exact same tournament one month ago and then they won’t finish it and don’t get to crown one champion.

If this wasn’t bad enough they sent out an list of payouts yesterday which was totally wrong. I go to the Swedish press and they write about it and this morning Svenska Spel send out an new list. This time 140k SEK (14k Euros) are missing if you compare it to the “old” list. They not only wont give any compensation to all those players who lost money in their way of handling this they also take away another 140k from their money.

If Svenska Spel had stopped the tournament when they should have had, when the problems started, this list would be ok. Then it’s a fair thing to do even if it’s sick to make the decision not to continue a prestigious tourney like this. Now it’s their fault they didn’t have anyone who supervised the tournament (which is the biggest they have this year) and who could stop it before this happened.
The story continues. The 15 very upset players are trying to talk to SvS and have now contacted media in hope they could get some redress in this big mess all created by Svenska Spel on the players expense…