Poker Related April Fools Day Gags 2024

Poker players are a funny bunch, right? Well at least they think they are, but we’ll let you be the judge of that. Monday was that most hilarious day of the year, when people just can’t stop themselves from attempting to prank their fellow human beings. But because its the most obvious day of the year to make jolly japes, they don’t usually fool all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time, in fact mostly they don’t even fool some of the people some of the time. Maybe a few clueless souls do fall for them for a split second or two, but the nature of April Fools jokes is that they are usually so outlandish that they stand out as obvious chuckles before you’ve even got past the headline.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of attempts at springtime humour by players and websites connected to the industry. Here’s a selection of poker related 2024 April Fools gags that you might have whizzed by on your Monday morning doom scrolling.

Coordinated with Pokernews, this gag cleverly played upon the recent Maskgate social media spat conducted between several high profile poker players. A few weeks ago it ungenerously suggested that some players might use medical conditions as an excuse to wear masks at the table, when their actual intention is to gain an advantage by hiding their facial expressions.

Phil Hellmuth claimed that he was selling facemasks, branded with Luxon Pay, the Aria and Sour Patch Kids at $17 to honour his record haul of seventeen WSOP winner’s bracelets. This one might actually have fooled a few people, so much so that Phil felt obligated to tweet that it was just a joke, something most April Fools pranksters never need to do.

It might not actually be a bad idea, if it were done for charity, as they can release new editions and raise the price $1 every time he wins a bracelet.

The smile raising news from Poker.org was that the WSOP was going to ban chip riffling at this summer’s 55th Annual World Series of Poker. Anyone who’s ever been to a live poker room, especially big events, will know that the noise made by players riffling and playing with their chips is the defining sound of real life poker. Even online poker sites use these sounds in their gameplay. It can be annoying for some people, but for most, it’s a comforting sound that lets people know they are in a poker environment. The first two levels of any poker tournament are when you notice it the most, as table talk is usually slow to get started.

For this gag, it was declared that a new rule 4.1 would impose a zero tolerance approach to anyone guilty of registering a sound over 40db due to ‘deliberate manipulation of poker chip’ and that it would primarily be the dealers’ responsibility to police it, however they see fit. Such a misdemeanour at the poker table would be punishable with a one round penalty, while a second offence would trigger automatic disqualification from the tournament, with lifetime bans handed to persistent offenders throughout the series. Hilariously, exceptions for players like Phil Hellmuth were also to be written into the rule book.

Another inventive April Fools gags came from the Triton Poker Series. Triton is the poker tour with the biggest buy-in in the world and did once hold an event with a £1m buy-in in London, the Triton Million for Charity, in 2019. It was announced on the Triton website that they have scheduled another £1m buy-in event, which would have a stripped back deck of only 20 cards (Aces, Kings, Queens, Jacks and Tens only). It was also claimed that this wouldn’t be a one-off and would be held at every stop of the Triton Series from now on.

Now Triton do indeed hold very big events and it would have been almost believable, if the game had been a regular 32 card short-deck game. It could well have fooled people who don’t really know much about poker, but there was another huge red herring in the article that made it very clear that this was a joke. The event was claimed to be taking place at the next Triton Poker Series festival in Montenegro, yet the buy-in was listed as being in British Pounds.

This innovative gag was received well on social media, with many joking that they would not be surprised if something like this were actually to happen in the future.

And finally, there was WPT Global's lolworthy announcement that they won’t be charging any rake at all on (most) tournaments on the site during April. But hang on, that’s not actually a joke, they are actually doing it. Having announced it on the 1st of April, they had to point out that although it may seem like a too-good-to-be-true offer, it wasn’t an April Fools joke at all. 

Apart from live event satellites and private tournaments, all other MTTs on WPT Global are rake free and instead the fee element of buy-ins will go into prize-pools. For example, tournaments that were $50+$5 are now $55+$0 for all of April 2024.