Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open - $2.5 million overlay in the Main Event, controversy in the High Roller

The 2014 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open is currently being held at the Florida Hotel and Casino, but due to poor scheduling, their $10 million guaranteed tournament has an overlay of $2.5 million, as well as problems with the $100,000 buy-in High Roller tournament, where organizers wanted to change the payout structure at the end of Day 1. 

The event had been widely promoted, but they scheduled the tournament to overlap with the Playground Poker Club's event in Canada and the Winstar Series in Oklahoma, which resulted in only 1499 players registering for the $5,300 buy-in, which is a huge drop from last year's number of 2384.

Even if we discount the $300 tournament fee that every player paid, the casino still has to pay out more than $2 million from their pockets.

The overlay was not the only in the tournament series, the $100,000 buy-in High Roller tournament also caused a lot of trouble. As Scott Seiver tweeted, the director of poker operations was unavailable when they tried to solve a dispute, because he was on vacation, which is quite shocking, considering the SHRPO is the biggest event of the year for the casino.

Scott Seiver

The dispute was about the payout structure, as Seiver tweeted it, the floorman told the 9 registered players that 2 places are going to get paid, then at the end of Day 1, he said they made a mistake and 3 players are getting paid.

Seiver was outraged by this decision, since the payout structure should never be changed at the point of the tournament. After 2 hours of arguing, the management decided to uphold the initial payouts.