Unibet Poker Open and WPTDeepStacks: Olali and Franco Win

Previous thread on this case was archived so I thought I’d post it with additional information & updates.
This is an ongoing investigation (by private investigators) so I will start with the most important information about Jon as an appeal to anyone who has any information on his disappearance.
Name: Jon Throstur Jonsson
Date Missing: 09/02/2019
Last Seen: Swords Road, Whitehall, North Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Height: 6’3”
Built: Medium Built
Hair Colour: Brown
At the time of his disappearance Jon was wearing black jeans, a black padded jacket, a black T-shirt with a printed white letters and picture on the front, and black sneakers with a white base.
The disappearance
Jon arrived to Dublin, Republic of Ireland on 8th February, 2019 with plans on joining a poker tournament over the weekend and spending the rest of his time holidaying in the country (Independent.ie, 2020). Based on information provided by his family, Jon arrived to the country on his own, checked into the Bonnington Hotel (Whitehall, North Dublin) that hosted the tournament and played poker through the night on the day of his arrival. His fiancé, Jana, arrived to Ireland the following morning (9/02/19) and found Jon in his hotel room’ sleeping, at around 10 AM. After a brief conversation Jana decided to go downstairs to get a coffee. While doing so Jon suddenly left the hotel at around 11.05 AM. Although the reason of him leaving has never been cleared, it is for certain that he left most of his belongings including his phone, passport and wallet behind, having only his hotel room key card in his possession. Despite this fact, his family speculates that he might have had a large amount of cash on him, although this has never been confirmed. After leaving the hotel, Jon was seen on CCTV at 11.07 AM passing a bar and a nursing home before exiting onto Swords Road heading towards Collins Avenue. He was last seen walking past the entrance of Highfield Healthcare Centre.
After her fiancé not returning all day, Jana grew increasingly worried and reported Jon missing to the Gardaí on 10th February, 2019. Members of Jon’s family flew over from Iceland right away and an extended search was carried out by them, civils, Gardaí and the Civil Defence, but they found no trace or lead to what could have happened to Jon.
His family has never given up hope on finding him and after the immediate searches have led them to no information, the family hired an Irish private investigator, Liam Brady, to continue to work on the case. According to the latest updates published shortly after the first anniversary of Jon’s disappearance, it is understood that “Mr Brady and a colleague are now working on a lead involving someone who is currently incarcerated in a European prison and it is believed this person may have some ‘key information’ which could point the investigation in the right direction” (Irish Independent, 2020). There has been no further information elaborating on this lead or any other updates.
Further information:

• This was the first time Jon visited Ireland and had no acquaintances, friends or family in the country.
• According to his family Jon lost about €4000 during the night of playing poker which has played a major part in people’s theories about this case, however it has never been confirmed officially that it had anything to do with his disappearance. In an interview Jon’s sister also assumed that he might have won some money too, but she didn’t elaborate and this has never been confirmed either.
• Jon, who worked as a taxi driver in Iceland, had recently renewed his license and had ‘family arrangements’ for the near future – his family described his disappearance as ‘completely out of character’.
• Jon’s brother who gave a number of interviews to Irish media described him as a ‘nice, caring, reliable and stable’ guy who was healthy and fit both physically and mentally and had no history of making ‘reckless’ decisions or wanting to escape his life. His brother also added that they had a very close relationship and Jon was very open about his finances - if he was in need of money he could have asked for help from any member of his family.
• On the CCTV footage leaving the hotel and walking away, Jon appears to be calm and lights up a cigarette, walking casually as if on a stroll for some fresh air.
• During the investigation carried out straight after his disappearance, Gardaí received many calls regarding sightings of Jon, however he was never officially traced further than Swords Road.

Theories/Personal Opinion:
As mentioned above most theories argue that Jon must have met someone on the night of playing poker, someone spotted him being a foreigner seemingly on his own with a large amount of cash or his disappearance was somehow the result of him losing a lot of money the night before. Even though these theories seem plausible and not at all far-fetched, there are a few factors contradicting these arguments. While it isn’t unlikely that Jon (as the latest updates also indicate) was met with foul play due to the circumstances, I, personally, highly doubt that he was the only foreigner with a lot of cash on him participating on this tournament. Although, I don’t have much information on how secure the hotel or the event was, the advertisement to the festival seems valid and appears to be a professionally organized tournament with a detailed schedule and many ‘games’ going on at once during the weekend. At first it did not strike me as an event where something ‘suspicious’ could happen – but it could be just the fact that I am a very naïve resident of Dublin who hasn’t encountered anything of the sort.
On this point, I don't know how 'dangerous' this neighborhood could be as I am not particularly familiar with Whitehall myself. At a first glance it appears to be a very ‘average’ suburban area with a good few schools, sports fields, bars, shops and housing estates around (fellow Dubliners if you beg to differ, don’t hesitate), not to mention that he disappeared around midday on a Saturday with a lot of pedestrians and traffic in the area. This was also what gave great hope to his loved ones, assuming that many people must have passed by Jon on the street and whatever happened, there has to be eyewitnesses out there.
Another point why an ‘impulsive’ attack seems a bit unlikely to me is the obvious lack of evidence – no crime scene was ever established and no solid proof has ever been recovered that could have traced Jon to any location in the area. If it was foul play, as latest updates indicate, the culprits took great care of making Jon and the crime ‘untraceable' - and invisible to an extent. I also struggle to build a clear connection between his disappearance and his attendance on the poker tournament.
Theories further discuss possibilities such as Jon being invited to an ‘underground’ poker game where he was met with the ‘wrong crowd’, however it wouldn’t explain his sudden departure from the hotel without saying anything to his fiancé. If he planned to play poker somewhere else, he must have assumed he wouldn’t be back before his fiancé returned from the hotel lobby and notice that he was gone. I also found information (comments on Jon’s missing person’s Facebook page) that many of the missing person posters that were put up around Dublin have been ripped and destroyed straight away, some speculating that it was by the people who know what happened to Jon – this however is not a piece of information I would consider very reliable or valid.
Taking all these bits and pieces into consideration, the case remains a tragic, unsolved mystery. I sincerely hope that the latest lead disclosed by the private investigator will bring about an explanation and that his family will find closure and peace.
What are your thoughts on this case? Was Jon lured in by the wrong people who promised him big money and was met with foul play? Or was it a ‘spontaneous’ attack that somehow went unnoticed by many?
Sources I used writing this post:
https://jonjonssonmissing.com/
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/fresh-hope-as-new-lead-is-probed-in-case-of-missing-icelander-jon-jonsson-38946058.html
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/somebody-saw-something-family-of-missing-icelandic-man-jon-jonsson-issue-fresh-appeal-on-crimecall-38247787.html
https://www.thesun.ie/news/4853561/sister-missing-jon-jonsson-dead/
https://uk.pokernews.com/news/2020/01/unibet-dublin-poker-festival-features-55-events-in-18-days-37361.htm
Last CCTV footage of Jon:
https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/dublin-news/cctv-footage-shows-last-movements-15886350

I've been provided the following summary by a guy who is contemplating investing in FF. He has a lot of experience in the area, and his thoughts raise a few questions which I'd like to see addressed by the FunFair development team, so if you guys are around, would be good to get your take on the following (apologies for formatting, paragraphs not showing up for some reason):
"Funfair at that price is still a good buy. Look people love gambling online, the concept is fantastic and ultimately could be a huge winner but I have some concerns.
The people running it are still a limited corporation right with the ultimate aim being to make money, they don't pretend otherwise and thats to their credit.
The potential risks are, in this order, user experience and adoption. You can't get supreme user experience without adoption and ultimately historical user data and you can't get adoption without ongoing usage.
I'll list what I feel their - huge - challenges are:
There are some serious players in the online gambling space that offer b2b platforms. Playtech essentially provides the software for all the casino, bingo, slots and poker platforms of the likes of Paddy Power, William, Coral, Mansion, Bet365, Gala, 888, Titan, Ladbroke, Betfred and a shit ton of others.
Microgaming would be their closest competitors - they have Unibet, Nordicbet, BetVictor and a ton of others.
There are others that have been before, and been very good but closed down due to being unable to keep market share of were simply bought out. It's an incredibly competitive space.
Playtech and Microgaming develop and maintain solutions that are then licensed to their clients on multi year, multi million dollar contracts. That's the space Funfair wants to operate in. They will not offer live services, their business model is to license their platform to others.
The question here is, who do they license to? All the big players are already tied up with the two noted service providers above - or run their own proprietary software like Stars/Tilt/Party.
The noted above essentially rules out the top 15 online gambling operators that account for well over 95% of the market. The others feed on their scraps, and ultimately profit out of regulation dodging.
I worked in online gaming for many years, in marketing then development then operations and localisation and back to marketing. I started in 2002 and spent a lot of time going back and forth to Costa Rica and other mental locations working with the likes of Titan, CD, Bodog, Absolute, UB and Microgaming before moving to Full Tilt full time in LA, Vancouver and Dublin from 2005 to 2011.
I seen online gambling come out of nowhere in a completely unregulated space and explode, I was there when compliance and regulatory bodies were Indian reservations in Canada and also saw and lived through the real regulation slowly creep in and one swoop wipe 40%+ value off companies overnight or even cripple companies along the way, all for the good of the Vegas casinos btw, absolute scumbags.
The one thing that I had a lot of insight to was user numbers, user experience and player behaviour and retention across a very very large period of time so the sample data is huge. Full Tilt and Stars were trading blows in late 08 to late 09 in what was an insane period of traffic potentially hitting 125,000 users online at any given time on both networks, that was just poker.
On casino, slots and bingo, the peak network numbers were approximately 60,000 at any given time on the big sites. But that wasn't consistent wagering. I believe it's dropped significantly since I vacated the industry. Skinned sites could make their owners a comfortable living on <1000 users, again though a lot of skins still get their licensing certification from fake regulatory bodies in Kahnawake, or Panama.
The "legit" businesses are all regulated by either Isle Of Man, UK, Malta or Alderney gaming commissions.
If they're a multi country facing operation, and are not regulated by one of the above - chances are they're operating illegally with no proof of customer funds being held in escrow.
There are of course country specific regulations such as in France and Italy where you can only operate online gambling legally by offering it as a separate player pool as your main offering so that only players in that geographical location can play on the country specific platform, no one from the outside can play in it and no one in the country can play on non country specific networks. They audit the software, as much as they're allowed to, and sign off on changes before it goes live. That regulation model is spreading at a huge rate.
The regulation is crazy. I worked a lot on the license applications at Tilt in France and Italy and it was absolutely insane the hoops that had to be jumped through just to get a sub par product on the market.
The reason I bring up regulation in so much depth is because all the b2b suppliers specified above will not offer the software to anyone without the correct licensing in place, and that needs to be provided in advance pre any agreement being signed. So all the "big boys" have licenses to operate in all their jurisdictions legally.
What happens then is because the b2b suppliers have the comfort that these operators have invested all the time, money and effort into obtaining legal licensing on all these markets, they know they're serious and have subsequently got them tied up to long term deals which makes them ultimately unavailable for the likes of funfair to market to.
Don't forget it's not also just about the technology, it has to be a great visual user experience.
That's a big problem because it only leaves rogue or lightly regulated operators as the people funfair could realistically license to, which is never going to encourage widespread adoption.
Its with that in mind that I feel the only potential for the funfair technology to really take off as a main player is to be absorbed by Playtech or Microgaming (or Stars) to introduce the technology into their own offerings OR they come out with a serious marketing budget and play the " how do you know you're not being cheated" card and create such a worldwide buzz in the industry with technology of total transparency that they create a 2.0 bubble, but in my conversations with them directly and with the research I've done, they're holding back on complete transparency - at least for now.
It's interesting for sure, I'll invest in the upcoming - primarily because I do believe in Ethereum significantly as a framework, but not sure for how much."