PokerStars bans Sunday Million champion

Champion, Luiz Felipe "lftgjc" Salest has been accused of ghosting by the site.

The most popular tournament of the site's schedule has a field of 5,779 entries, who created a prize pool of $1,555,800. Brazilian grinder "ltfgjc" managed to take down the event for $142,372.85 after a 3-way deal.

It all looked smooth and simple until a thread was created by "BustedHaus" on an international poker forum, where he/she informs the poker community about what happened. According to "BustedHaus", the Brazilian player is the member of a backing-team, Standard Backing and he usually plays much lower stakes (around $5). As he/she wrote, Salest's game changed significantly on the final table of the Sunday Million, which lead him to believe, that one of the Standard Backing coaches helped the less experienced player in the end game.

The original forum post

The reactions from other members were mixed, some saying there is no evidence of "ghosting", while others said it's easy to notice a major change in someone's game.

A tweet from runner-up Patrick "Egpiton" Tardif seemed to prove "BustedHaus" opinion. In his tweet, Tardif shared an email by PokerStars in which they informed him about the incident and refunded him with an additional prize over his $100K score. Patrick didn't disclose the amount.

Patrick's tweet

Since then, PokerStars has refunded the players who played the Sunday Million and banned "ltfgjc". It will be interesting to see how this affects Standard Backing in the future. Was this a mistake by the site or did they handle the situation properly? Let us know in the comments!