Lynn “Queen of Hearts” Paris
The story: One of my favorite poker players is 23-year-old multimillionaire, Fedor Holz. His winnings, in 2016 alone, are more than $16 million! In other words, he’s been on a blazingly hot winning streak, both live and online, including his huge SHR WSOP win of $4.9m. Whether sitting serenely at a poker table at EPT Barcelona, staring down the likes of Phil Hellmuth at the WSOP, or standing in The Cube in L
as Vegas laughingly trading barbs with his GPL opponent, Fedor just can’t help being lovable.
Which is why is seems so completely out-of-character that he would have called out owner/founder of The Global Poker League, Alexandre Dreyfus, over a late repayment of a loan of a few thousand dollars. One thing is for sure; it wasn’t about the money.
Apparently, Dreyfus told Holz and two other (as yet unidentified) high stakes players that he’d reached his daily limits on transfers after he went through $50,000 in less than a week to hurriedly set up The Cube in the GPL’s Vegas studio. He asked the three players for a short-term transfer of $30,000 combined to get him through until his limits refreshed, at which point he’d transfer them back their money in euros. Clearly, he must have completely trusted Holz to be discrete.
All three players allegedly realized that Dreyfus hadn’t repaid the loan when they “sat down with their books” several weeks later, at which point Dreyfus acknowledged the delay, apologized to the players both publicly and in private, and repaid the loans with five percent interest. He also claimed that he had legitimate reasons for the delay in repaying the debt. As for Holz, he said he had no desire to “harm” Dreyfus when he chose to discuss this situation in a public forum.
So here are the really odd bits about this story:
- Seriously? Fedor sits down with his books and does his own accounting? And even more surprising, amongst all his millions, he noticed he was short a few grand?
- Why would Dreyfus say that he had legitimate reasons for the delay, when it would have been far better to say he forgot and was sorry? Legitimate reasons could stir up a whole lot of doubt among GPL backers.
- Holz, while claiming not to want to harm Dreyfus, called the incident “questionable behavior as a serious entrepreneur and a show of missing integrity.” Those sound like harmful words to me, but maybe it’s just a bad translation, or a lack of maturity from a very rich but still young Fedor Holz.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d like to know what’s really going on. There’s something awfully strange about this story. And, with League poker action returning on September 20th, will Fedor still be representing the LA Sunset for the GPL?
The post What Really Happened Between Fedor Holz and Alex Dreyfus? appeared first on Texas Poker Store Blog.