Silence
is polite.
Speech is rude.

1. A waitress in the smoking room, while I was playing slots, told me that a dish recommended to me by a host from Playground's VIP program was not available. I said — politely — that I would go back and clarify with the host. She took offense, asserted that she knew what was on the menu, and as she walked away said, unprompted, "You're a joke!" Other patrons in the smoking room reacted in real time; several expressed that she was out of line. I referenced this directly in my March 30, 2024 email to the executive team — "direct confrontations by employees in front of patrons" — written in the moment, while I was still actively trying to resolve the matter.

2. On March 24, 2024, I emailed [email protected] under the subject "Urgent: Seeking Executive Intervention for Unresolved Concerns at Playground Poker." In the body of the message I wrote — verbatim, preserved in the archive: "I respectfully request that this message be escalated to the appropriate executive level, ideally including the CEO or a suitable senior leadership representative." That request is the documentary anchor for everything that follows.

3. [email protected] is monitored by the poker room department. In practice, a request for executive escalation sent to the venue's customer-service address was routed to the very department the complaint had no structural connection to. The poker manager on staff read the email and called me on the phone in response to it. The call was heated. Her position throughout was that there was no escalation path beyond her, grounded in her years of tenure. I argued two things, in order. First, that no manager in any organization is structurally the final escalation point; every manager has a supervisor. Second, that a smoking-room food-service incident is not a poker matter, so her department is not the right department to handle it in the first place. She held her position. I did not use profanity.

4. I continued to play. There was no ban in place at this point. I also continued trying to reach the executive level directly, because the poker manager had not escalated the matter — she had answered it herself and ended the exchange. Between March 28 and March 30, I wrote four additional emails directly to named Playground executives, attempting to bypass the poker room's monitored inbox and reach senior leadership by name. I received one unsolicited phone call on March 29 from a named executive with no extension left for a callback, and zero substantive written responses on the merits.

5. After the March campaign, I continued to visit Playground and play. Through April and May 2024 I was on the premises, my player card worked, and no staff member ever told me or suggested to me that my access had been affected in any way. After those visits I stopped attending the venue for a period of several months — for personal scheduling reasons, not because Playground had communicated anything. Playground made no contact during this window either.

6. On the morning of October 5, 2024, I decided to return to Playground for a planned poker session. I drove approximately two hours from home, arriving at approximately 6 AM. As is normal for a regular patron arriving at the venue, the first thing I did was put my player card into a slot machine to check whether any freeplay credits had been loaded since my last visit. The card would not read. I walked to the front desk. A clerk looked at her screen and, without sharing any information with me, called a manager on duty. A male manager arrived — a familiar face, someone I had dealt with in the past and who had extended me a good-faith goodwill gesture on a prior visit as a regular patron. He told me my card was locked and I was no longer welcome on the property.

7. I asked for a reason. He did not give me a formal one. He escorted me from the premises courteously, but firmly. Only after I pressed him repeatedly did he share the single piece of information he had: a brief note on my file, which he read as "a note that a Poker Manager Placed the Note." I then drove approximately two hours back home, and within three hours of arriving home I had written the full account in an email forwarded to [email protected] at 09:07 AM and then, 28 minutes later, in an email to the World Poker Tour executive team at 09:35 AM. Both October 5, 2024 emails are preserved and both open with the phrase "I have recently been banned" — contemporaneous evidence that this was the morning the ban was first discovered.