Who is maintaining this Playground Poker Club record.

I am a poker player. Until 2024 I was a foundational patron of Playground Poker Club in Kahnawà:ke, Québec, Canada. I had been playing there since the club opened in 2010. This site is not about who I am — it is about how a licensed venue treats a fourteen-year losing patron when the venue withdraws access silently and without written cause.

Over those fourteen years I put more than one hundred thousand Canadian dollars in documented combined poker buy-ins and slot-machine play across the venue's cash games, tournaments, and slot floor. I was a losing player overall. I am not an advantage player, I have never been a collusion risk, and I have never been disciplined by any other poker room in Canada. The venue's own system had assigned me to its VIP program, and I was on friendly terms with the host team.

In March 2024 a waitress in the smoking room, where I was playing slots, said "You're a joke!" to me — on her way out of an exchange over whether a dish recommended to me by a VIP host was available, as a parting remark, walking away, in front of other patrons who visibly reacted. I raised it as a customer-service matter.

On March 24, 2024, I emailed [email protected] — the venue's general customer-service address — requesting, in writing, that the matter be escalated to "the appropriate executive level, ideally including the CEO or a suitable senior leadership representative." That email is preserved in the archive.

[email protected] is monitored by Playground's poker room department. In practice, a request for executive escalation sent to the venue's general customer-service address was routed — structurally — to the very department the complaint had no connection to. What I received in response was a heated phone call from the poker manager on staff. Her position, throughout the call, was that there was no escalation path beyond her, grounded in her years of tenure. I argued two things, in order: that no manager in any organization is structurally the final escalation point, and that a smoking-room food-service complaint is not a poker matter. I did not use profanity. She held her position. The call ended without resolution and without any part of my request having been forwarded upward.

I kept playing. I was still a patron. Between March 24 and March 30, 2024, I wrote a series of executive-level emails to Playground's leadership team — first to [email protected], then directly to ten named executives — requesting that the customer-service complaint be escalated. I received one unsolicited phone call from a named executive with no extension left for a callback, and zero substantive written responses on the merits.

Through April and May 2024 I continued to visit Playground and play. My player card worked. No staff member ever indicated that my access had been affected. After those visits I stopped attending the venue for a period of several months, for personal scheduling reasons, not because of anything Playground had communicated. During that period Playground made no contact of any kind.

On the morning of October 5, 2024, I decided to return for a planned poker session. I drove approximately two hours from home, arriving at approximately 6 AM. As is typical 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. A male manager on duty arrived — a familiar face, a person I had dealt with in the past and who had extended me a good-faith goodwill gesture on a previous visit as a regular patron. He told me my card was locked and I was no longer welcome on the property. He escorted me from the premises courteously but firmly. Only after I pressed him repeatedly for any information did he share the one detail 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. Within three hours of arriving home I wrote the full account in an email to [email protected] and, 28 minutes later, in an email to the World Poker Tour executive team. Both emails are preserved and both open with the phrase "I have recently been banned", contemporaneous evidence that the discovery was the morning of October 5, 2024.