Yorky Pud

Back in May 2010 Ali Tekintamgac beat Roberto Garcia Santiago heads-up to become the World Poker Tour Spanish Championship winner and with it he won €278,000. Part of that prize money, $25,500 to be exact, was in the form of a seat to the WPT's finale, the WPT World Championship at the Bellagio, but the poker community is in uproar after Tekintamgac was allowed to take his seat despite allegations of cheating.

After his win at the Spanish Championship, Tekintamgac finished fifth in the €2,000 IPT Venice Main Event before heading to Estonia for EPT Tallin. Here, whilst in the money, Tournament Director Thomas Kremser asked Tekintamgac to leave the tournament after suspicion arose about him using fake bloggers and photographers to relay information back to him. Less than a month later he made it to the final table of the Partouche Poker Tour but just hours before it was due to begin he was disqualified, again for alleged cheating.

The case against Tekintamgac has never been completely proven in a court of law but the facts remain that there is video evidence suggesting he was receiving signals from people close to the action, photographic evidence of the same people standing at the opposite end of the table from Tekintamgac in several events and that the bloggers, who said they were following Tekintamgac due to his popularity on their site, named a site that did not even exist and never has done! Also, after his disqualification at Partouche, he was spotted playing in a Dutch tournament with the same bloggers and a player linked to Tekintamgac, a Kadir Karabulut, was later ejected from the tournament for alleged cheating offenses.

Unbelievably, the WPT have allowed Tekintamgac to take his seat at the $25,500 WPT World Championship where he has quite ironically made it through to Day 3 with a healthy stack of 205,800 and is in the top half of the chip counts. During yesterday's play Daniel Negreanu spotted the alleged cheater and immediately tweeted, “Ali Tekimtamgac who was caught cheating in Partouche is in #WPTChamp I called him out, and floor told ME I can't do that! When will we learn.”

An incensed Negreanu followed that up immediately with, “Bellagio/WPT should absolutely not allow this person in the event. He was caught red handed cheating and should be banned. This is absurd.” A short while later Negreanu took a photograph with his iPad2 of the player in question and accompanied it with the text, “This is a picture of the cheater. Its mind boggling that HE is being protected. Makes no sense.”

Negreanu also alleges that Tekintamgac threatened American pro Scott Siever when the latter was needling him about his alleged cheater exploits though these reports are still to be confirmed by sources other than Negreanu. If Siever was threatened in any way then it seems it did him some good as he finished the day on 461,300 chips, enough for fifth place out of the 116 surviving players.

When play resumes later today Tekintamgac will almost certainly be hounded constantly thanks to being on the same table as Phil Hellmuth  but also because a large rail will almost certainly be watching his other table mates, including Cliff “Johnny_Bax” Josephy, Farzad Bonyadi, Randy Dorfman, Jon “Pearljammer” Turner and Mike Sexton.

Stay tuned for all the news and developments from the Bellagio.