David Peters Responds to Accusations of Avoiding Debt Payments

David Peters has won $50m in tournament results over the past decade and more in the poker industry. With WSOP bracelets, high roller titles and the respect of his peers, why how did a player who seemingly had it all fail to pay back a $50,000 debt for investment in Dylan Linde? A week is a long time in poker.

Dylan Linde Announces the Debt

“His action ends up being a $50k loss. We agree he will settle at Poker Masters. He doesn’t show up.”

It was shock news when the American-born Canadian-based player Dylan Linde announced an unpaid debt this week. Not because debts don’t go unpaid in poker. As industries go, poker is a strange one, where players who make decisions worth millions of dollars don’t head to reputable staking sites like PokerStake or Stake Kings but instead decide to sell to each other in the corridor before a game is about to start. No, the shock came because of the player who was said to have not paid back the debt – David Peters.

When Linde took to X, he explained that it was as a last resort, an outing of a player whose dirty laundry he never wished to air in public. The statement was, however, damaging and stark in its condemnation of Peters when it came.

“I deeply regret doing business with David Peters,” it began. “Last summer, David purchased a piece of the $50k PLO WSOP that I won. I paid him out a large amount, in cash, a couple days later. A few months later I’m at Triton Jeju and David buys a piece of my two Main Events (NLHE and PLO). He asks if it’s OK if we settle after Triton as his available liquidity at the event is low. Sure, no problem. His action ends up being a $50k loss. We agree he will settle at Poker Masters. He doesn’t show up.”

That’s just the start of the story, however, because Linde then goes into detail about how Peters not only failed to show at the PokerGO Poker Masters series in Las Vegas, but then gave Linde the literal runaround by asking to ‘settle up’ at the North American Poker Tour event in The Bahamas, before paying back just $27,000 of the debt over two payments before saying that no more is coming. Linde closed out with a warning, saying: “Since this began I’ve found out about other bad debts and bad business deals, so I feel obligated to make this public.”

Peters Responds to Allegations

It took several days of speculation before David Peters replied to the comments in his own statement, which both explains how the situation was true but also left out a specific apology or the details of how he got himself into such a precarious financial situation.

Here is David Peters’ statement on X in full:

“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 1^st. I was telling him that I was working on settling the rest ASAP, 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 [an X 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.”

The statement may lack the bones of why the money went missing or what the doubling down was, leading to players and fans speculating but it does promise that Dylan Linde will be paid back in full. While many seem to think that Peters’ issues stem from investments outside of poker, such as cryptocurrency, no-on can fault Peters for going public with a partial explanation and the promise of paying back the debt in full.

Poker World Reacts with Mixed Take

Some of Peters’ fellow professionals have responded kindly to the situation, while others have absolutely not. Garrett Adelstein said: “One of the good guys DP, always have been.” Others don’t agree with this take at all, with Brent Harvey questioning how anyone could win $50 million and not be able to pay back $50,000. The answer to this was broken down neatly by the Canadian poker legend Sam Greenwood this week, who wrote a Substack post all about how poker players make a lot less money than fans think.

Many of Peters and Linde’s poker peers spoke up, with the WSOP bracelet winner and World Poker Tour anchor Tony Dunst saying, “Damn. Hate to see this stuff but respect for speaking up.” Matt Salsberg went further, decrying the “pile-on” in an angry post on X.

Johnny ‘Vibes’ Moreno called the situation “really unfortunate”, while Aram Oganyan questioned Linde of the context of Peters saying he wouldn’t be paying the rest back, to which Linde responded, “He said he can’t pay. In general, I’m sympathetic towards folks who bad things happen to and can’t pay a debt. The problem is when months of obfuscation occur.”

That David Peters got himself in a situation where he couldn’t make whole a poker debt is certainly unfortunate, mostly for Dylan Linde. That anyone so successful in poker can end up in such a predicament is a warning shot to other professionals to invest their winnings very wisely and possibly more conservatively as their careers grow. For buyers and sellers, even lenders, the message seems as simple as it is clear: don’t trade pieces of your action without going through a legitimate site where the funds have to be cleared before they are bought and sold.

Our own Phil Hourgettes spoke for many when he said: “Peters is the last pro I’d expect this from, from the outside looking in.”