David Peters took to Twitter to acknowledge his deep regret for the choices he made, which led Linde to call him out on social media for an unpaid debt.
Peters bought Linde’s action at a Triton Poker Series stop in Jeju last year, which led to Peters owing Linde $50,000. Considering that David Peters has nearly $50 million in career live tournament earnings, good for 14th on poker’s all-time money list, most people would expect a debt of that size to be relatively pocket change.
However, according to Linde, Peters has dodged paying him back in full for over eight months, with Linde recovering only a little over $27,000 of the debt to date.
David Peters makes statement
David Peters, who only posts on social media a few times a year, took to Twitter and released a four-tweet statement.
Peters also refuted Linde’s claim that he told Linde he could not ever pay the remaining balance.
Linde told Aram Oganyan on Twitter that: “He said he can’t pay. In general, I’m sympathetic towards folks who have bad things happen to them and can’t pay a debt. The problem is when months of obfuscation occur.”
Peters also admitted he failed in attempting to double down his way out of trouble.
“I wanted to address the Dylan situation. I deeply regret the choices that I made that led to him not trusting that he was going to get paid back and felt the need to post about it. I’m sure that wasn’t an easy thing to do and I should have never allowed it to get to that point.
“I got myself into a bad situation where I just kept doubling down and making things worse while having very poor communication and missed timelines. There seemed to be some confusion around the wording from the original post about when I sent the last payment on April 1st.
“I was telling him that I was working on settling the rest asap and not that I wouldn’t or couldn’t ever pay the rest. Just wanted to clarify that. I was always going to make him whole whether there was a twitter post or not and will have this taken care of soon.
“I certainly handled the situation very poorly and I understand the frustrations. Right now my focus is on making things right and trying to regain the trust of the community.”
Poker community reacts
The reaction was generally positive, given Peters’ long-standing reputation in the poker community, both with fellow players and poker fans alike.
Nathanael Kogel wrote: “Tbh, how you are addressing it now is how it should be, you never lost my respect. Shit happens, people make mistakes. It’s how you fix it going forward that makes the comeback even better.”
Rob Kuhn replied: “You’ll be back on your feet soon bro. Keep your head up.”
Jerod Smith said: “Never fun when stuff like this happens, rooting for you to get back on your feet and get it all squared.”
However, David Peters was not able to avoid a slew of Twitter trolls. Many people, including comedian/poker player Clayton Fletcher, noted that David Peters never said the word “sorry” once in his statement.
Twitter user @pedaltheglobe said: “$50m in career winnings, and can’t come up with a small 5-figure sum. Bad debt aside, are people seeing the reality of modern poker yet? The idea of a professional poker player died years ago. Only people making money from this game are the pro influencers masked as pro poker players.”
User @jeffmush1 complained about staking and swapping in general: “This high-stakes poker world is so weird with everyone swapping pieces and being staked. I feel like it ruins the game, and people play differently when they don’t have 100% of themselves.”
Unfortunately, many have been attacking his girlfriend and the mother of his child, Hayley Hanna. She has deleted everything from her Twitter account except for a single retweet from the late Mac Miller, which reads: “Stop keeping score. Just keep swimming.”
