Dylan Linde broke his news on Twitter about an ongoing debt with David Peters. We'll get into the response from Peters afterwards.
I deeply regret doing business with David Peters. 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 (NL & 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 PokerMasters. He doesn’t show up.
Next time I speak with him he says he will settle at NAPT. He doesn’t show up. I ask him to settle before Bahamas. He asks for wire info, I never receive funds. I start to get a bit worried.
When I ask him what’s going on he says he’s “trying to free up liquidity and will keep me updated”. No updates follow unless I ask and I receive the same answer. This repeats until I tell him to pay by end of February or I’ll out him.
He then sends $12k and change, saying he will get the rest. The end of February comes and I’m convinced to give him another month. April 1st he sends me 15k and says he cannot pay the remaining balance.
Since this began I’ve found out about other bad debts and bad business deals, so I feel obligated to make this public.
Aram Oganyan: "Could we get more context on what he said when he said he isnt paying you the rest? Thanks"
Dylan Linde: "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."
David Peters, who has $50 million in career prize money, has indeed missed the last big series.
In September, he played nine tournaments at Triton in Jeju and cashed only once. His seventh-place finish in the $40,000 tournament earned him $118,000, but he spent at least $630,000 on buy-ins. Factoring in reentries, he's likely to have paid significantly more.
He missed the PokerGo studio's High Roller series, the WSOP in the Bahamas, and the spring Triton event in Jeju. In 2026, David had only one cash – in the $5k WPT Venetian.
Commentators were divided into three camps.
- Some thanked Dylan for bringing the situation to light.
- Some were further convinced that million-dollar poker wins are an illusion.
- Some unleashed their anger on David and his family.
Others found poorly-aged tweets from last year.
"Excuse me?" Alex Duval asked, surprised, and posted a screenshot of David from HendonMob.
Daniel Negreanu spoke on this topic last April:
In 1999, if you traveled the world playing the highest stakes tournaments, you couldn’t spend more than $250,000.
In 2013 that number rose to roughly $1.2 million.
In 2025, that number is roughly $12 million.
You need to cash for $12 million+ to turn a profit if you play all the Triton, WSOP, and other high rollers.
In 2024 only 3 players cashed for $12 million:
- Adrian Mateos
$13,109,217- Patrik Antonius
$12,488,048- Alejandro Lococo
$12,287,737Not everyone will hit every stop, but among the high roller regs that play most of them, I think spending $10 million is reasonable considering every Triton stop will run you about $2 million in buy ins.
The rest of Daniels tweet, and the discussion it caused on Twitter, is all found at the link below.
Read ReadShaun Deeb came to the defense of the high rollers, speaking in his own unique style. That means, he doesn't use periods. We've adjusted his writing.
As sad as the David Peters story is, I always laugh at all the comments crapping on high-stakes MTT pros. I'm going to guess his $ issues is way more likey to massive crypto losses not lack of poker winnings.
There is so much more honesty and wealth generated from MTTs than anyone realizes than any other form of poker. Sorry, its just the truth. You are breakeven because you suck not because everyone else is also breakeven or worse.
Josh Arieh expressed a similar thought:
I find it comical that because one “MTT player” is illiquid and can’t pay his debts, now all MTT players are unprofitable.
I read today that MTT players earn about as much as McDonald employees.
I can almost guarantee that DP’s struggling isn’t from his inability to be profitable at poker, and more to do with other gambling /investing.
Nick Palma called on people to be kinder:
"I'm not exactly sure what's going on with the David Peters situation, but he's always been a really nice guy. It's really sad how people will be so happy when someone falls down in life. I understand if he f***ed up or whatever, he needs to do the right thing. Dylan did what he had to, that's completely fair. But you'll never see a very successful person kicking someone when they're down or speaking on it. Never. Not one really successful person. There's a reason for that.
If you're one of those people who is really happy when someone falls, you have to look inward. It's about what's inside you, not what's inside them. David Peters has always been a really nice guy. I hope whatever is going on gets situated."
"Thank you for those words," Peters' wife, Helly Hannah, thanked him. "There's not a drop of malice in David, and he's doing everything he can to sort out his problems. I have nothing to do with them (even though I've already received a ton of hate and even death threats), but I'll do everything I can to ensure the situation is resolved quickly and that no one involved suffers mentally."
David Peters tweeted later, addressing the allegations:
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.
David will not be the last poker debt we hear about. Even the most esteemed professionals run into problems, no matter how high their earnings might appear to be.
Tom Dwan for example, has debt rumored to be in the millions.
Read Read