Woke up this morning talking a little Full Tilt with The Poker Beat crew … and looking back through some old archives …

I remember hearing about this “new site” from Clonie way back before they even existed (and the UIGEA was about as unimaginable as Barack Obama). Was looking to see if I happened to write anything that woulda implied a belief in ownership even before Pokerati’s traffic was borne from Google searches for “Clonie Gowan naked”.

I did not find anything resembling contractual evidence, but I did come across this site’s first-ever post … which seems a bit ironic in hindsight. For those wanting to join me in this self-indulgent quest for perspective:

APRIL 21, 2004
ON TILT?
It seems like everyone and their grandmother is opening up an online poker room these days. And why not? Each imaginary table that pops open in the cyberether forms a little vortex of constant pecuniary intake (no matter what’s happening in the game itself). But is the market at a saturation point?

Probably so, but that didn’t stop Full Tilt Poker from going online this week. Despite the competition, I suspect this site — a venture put together by a bunch of top pros (Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Phil Gordon, et al.) — will fare well. Haven’t played it yet, but at first glance they’ve upped the graphical interface significantly. And the ability to give your avatar facial expressions … very cool. Could change the online game when you think about it.

Posted by Dan Michalski on April 21, 2004 09:20 AM

Click the links, which are archived.org … bias or not, honestly surprising that the judge wouldn’t give these sorts of old records a look, let alone her attorneys a chance to depose the other defendants about them.

LOL: Is the market at a saturation point?

ALT HED: Kicking myself for not using an affiliate code

Speaking of Oklahoma .. Clonie officially lost her lawsuit against Full Tilt last week. Though attorneys tell me it’s very strange that this case couldn’t get at least to the discovery phase — I mean it was all out there very publicly … she clearly had some relationship with Full Tilt, so in most cases being able to dispute the contractual nature of said relationship would be perfunctory.

Anyhow, bummer for Clonie and selfish-bummer for those of us who were curious to hear what the likes of Chris Ferguson, Ray Bitar, and Howard Lederer had to say about the early formation of Full Tilt under oath in the heat of deposition.

But here’s the judge’s three-strikes and you’re out ruling, with some explanation of why she will not get her day in Federal court. Seems more a matter of legal strategy than the merits of the case to me … but maybe some others with more-than-none law-schooling will weigh in on that.

Her attorneys, Howard & Howard, btw, will have another go in Nevada state court moving forward representing Jason Newitt and that other guy, Hilton Warmback in their similar contract disputes with Full Tilt.

Mostly unrelated, but hey, there’s a video … the day before this ruling came down, Newitt won the PLO/8 tourney and about $17k at the LAPC. Not bad for a guy who may or may not own a piece of Full Tilt:

The US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling earlier this month that American plaintiffs are not entitled to get their day in American courts for discrepancies with offshore online poker sites.

This case specifically addressed two players in Ohio who sued PartyPoker claiming collusion. However, the court ruled, and the Appeals court upheld: Sorry, take your beefs against Party to Gibraltar. When they signed on and agreed to play, they did so accepting Terms and Conditions agreeing to handle all disputes in Gib, nowhere else, the court said.

Here’s the tale from poker-law expert I. Nelson Rose:
Trial in Gibraltar or Jail in Ohio

In it …

But the concurring opinion of Judge Merritt, quoted above, should give all Internet poker operators and players some nightmares. He ruled that the case had to be heard in Gibraltar, because to allow Ohio state law to apply would mean Wong, Gibson and everyone working for Party Poker would have to go to jail!

No one had raised the issue of whether Internet poker was illegal. “But sometimes courts have to raise embarrassing questions that both parties to litigation had rather we overlooked.”

Not so sure I agree that this decision “should give all Internet poker operators some nightmares.” I think it’s kinda the opposite. With Full Tilt juggling cases of varying frivolity out the ying-yang, I gotta think they’d be pretty happy with what could be precedent to force plaintiffs to take up matters outside (the US).

Party Gaming’s stock, btw, has been doing quite nicely of late:

PRTY.L

The Full Tilt legal battles are heating up … and this time they are on the offensive, suing Cycalona Gowen in federal court.

Full Tilt (specifically Tiltware, LLC, out of California) is not seeking money from her beyond court costs and attorney fees. But they do want a clear declaration that she does not have the 1 percent ownership interest she alleges.

Click here to read Tiltware’s compaint against Gowen, filed on Friday.

So why would they be doing this? Well according to the Nevada lawyers I’ve spoken to, that’s hard to say …

Essentially, they’re looking for the court to rule against her without having a trial. She goes to court again on February 1, for the third and last time, with the court deciding if her Third-Amended Complaint has merits to proceed. But if Full Tilt wins, and the judge says, yeah, sorry, we can’t waste a jury’s time with this … then maybe they don’t win enough?

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Man, 2009 sure has been a year full of lawsuits, no? People seem to need money these, and I suppose they gotta find it somewhere … and that may or may not alter their perception of who really owes what to whom. Beyond the frivolous, sometimes the big guy screwed the little guy, other times the little-guy with big-money poker dreams (but little experience in poker) defrauded backers and/or customers, and other times plans just didn’t work, and the parties can’t seem to agree on what they agreed on.

In this situation, Guardian Gaming is suing Montel Williams and the International Team Poker League in federal court over a $300k apparently investment gone awry.

The plan called for a team tournament concept attached to live casino events and a (new) online poker site. I dunno … sounds to me a little like the Poker Bowl meets WorldPokerParty.com, maybe with a dash of Sports Legends Challenge?

Without looking too deeply into the Montel case, we can tell you:

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Unconfirmed … but that’s the word we’re spreading, based on possibly drinky information from a semi-reliable source, a presumably reliable source, and a plausibly reliable source.

The status of PokerPages has been up in the air ever since they announced they’d be closing up shop effective Oct. 31. That day passed and they still kept publishing — and even sent two reporters to cover the November Nine. But no original content has been put up on the site since Dec. 3. Everyone was expecting some sort of sale, and now that has apparently gone through.

PokerPages, of course, is one of the oldest poker information sites on the internet – having reported on tournaments since 2000 … and having built a massive tourney/player/results database in the process.

What PokerStars plans to do with a site they haven’t yet told many people they’ve bought (or intend to buy) remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the transition from NeverwinPoker to Donkdown seems complete — with the old NWP forums successfully transfered over to their new home. Donkdown is now a Bryan Micon and Todd Witteles (aka “Dan Druff”) joint, with no more Tony G or Dustin Woolf, who is now the lone face for his namesake site.

Speaking of forums … 2+2 honcho Mason Malmuth has sued Dutch Boyd (and a guy named Anthony Scocozza) over domain squatting issues.

Oh, and our once-superbeloved PokerBlog.com … yeah, they’re apparently gone. For at least the past week, visiting the site gives you this message:

Fatal error: Table ‘./pokerblog/cache’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT data, created, headers FROM cache WHERE cid = ‘variables’ in /home/pokerblogcom/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66

R.I.P. Yeah, seems kinda appropriate. PokerBlog was/is a PartyPoker operation … but now they seem to be focussing blogging efforts on their more official company blog.

UPDATE: PokerBlog is back. Looks like we can expect some WPT coverage there.

Use of Sally Anne Boyer’s image is what’s in dispute.

Sally Anne Boyer, 2007 WSOP Ladies’ World Champion, filed a suit Monday against Harrah’s and the WSOP Academy, claiming they’ve used her name and likeness without authorization, and falsely claiming she’s a graduate of the Academy.

Boyer contends that she only attended the first day of the two-day Ladies Academy event, never completing the course, so was not a graduate. Post Oak Productions, the company that produces the WSOP Academy produced an email from August 2007 from Boyer asking to mail a picture of her in ‘poker tournament attire’ to use for further promotions.

More details available from the Las Vegas Sun.

Face the Ace: Whether he’s abusively litigious or not is up for debate, but the Hollywood lawyer challenging Full Tilt (right) is apparently no legal schlep.

Just looking into the lawyer pressing the RICO Bot-suit against Full Tilt … Cyrus Sanai … from the best I can tell, he’s quite the loose-aggressive legal player … perhaps a self-appointed Gus Hansen of the courtroom?

Back in the day he wrote for Slate.com, about issues such as assisted suicide and school violence … and seemed to dig the journalism thing during his days at Harvard. (That’s where he went for undergrad. Law School at UCLA.)

His most recent case of note came last year, when he engaged in an ongoing battle against an LA judge … where Sanai found the judge’s personal blog, complete with humorous/bizarre porn images, and outed his NSFW fetish proclivities while was adjudicating a big obscenity case against a pornographer:

The question is how someone who has frequently engaged in frivolous litigation still remains a member of the California bar without any disciplinary record. It will be appalling if Kozinski faces judicial discipline in this dispute before Sanai faces attorney discipline.

More on what the LA legal community has to say about him below:

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PokerNews probably woulda prefered their name were never attached to this event.

The Venetian sued the parent company of the Sports Legends Challenge last week in Clark County Court, claiming the operation skipped out on a contract to the tune of $174k.

And now, according to at least one disgruntled former employee and phones no longer being answered, the operation full-on shut down today.

We can only imagine, that this is just the beginning of the fallout, actually.

Think about it … you’ve got two lawsuits regarding the set-up of the event … and we haven’t even gotten to the Bahamas yet!

Whether or not there was any fraud-like criminal activity in this multimillion-dollar-semi-bluff-gone-awry remains to be seen. Two lawsuits aside, potential additions to the got-screwed list include:

– Player who bought in
– Investors
– Charities hosting casino events promising SLC seats as prizes
– Players who won those seats
– Players who chopped and paid cash for the extra portion of those seats
– Poker pros who fronted their own travel costs

Anyone else?

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Here’s the actual Kennedy vs. FTP lawsuit, 19 pages, filed by Cyrus Sanai, a lawyer out of Beverly Hills.

And here’s the 2+2 thread from 2007 when the key plaintiff — Lary Kennedy (aka “pokergirl_z” on Full Tilt) — first spelled out her beefs that led to this lawsuit … mostly stemming from a series of heads-up matches against a Full Tilt player known as “TheComplainer”.

Kennedy is the real plaintiff. Greg Omoroy is just a guy who owned another account she used (which is a whole-nother issue altogether). And though they aren’t formally seeking class-action status, they do seem to be laying the groundwork for such a possibility — an aggressive legal play for sure.

Essentially, the allegations are that Full Tilt — with unfettered ability to label a player a bot, confiscate her money, and smear her name by calling her a bot — constitutes organized crime … being perpetuated by Californians against Californians, in violation of all sorts of California business and gaming laws.

They also say that “Playing Against the Pros” is tantamount to gambling against the “house” … there’s an added boogeyman with allegations that Full Tilt is running its own bots on the site … and a new-to-me company gets discussed, too: Verta Enterprises, out of St. Kitts.

On the surface, that seems less shakedown/extortion-y than other California lawsuits against Full Tilt. But the class-action possibilities suggest this suit is really looking for penalties in the hundreds of millions or more — you know, the kind of money the Feds have been collecting from longtime online gambling purveyors looking to get on the USA clean list.

If it turns out pokergirl_z was not a bot — and she claims to have video proof — it could be quite the expensive security goof.

Click below for further breakdown of the suit:

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Two players in California have sued presumable principals of Full Tilt Poker in LA Superior Court. Lary Kennedy (aka Poker Girl) and Greg Omotoy (a Vegas-reared LA nightclub manager) claim that Full Tilt confiscated $80,000 from their accounts, believing they were bots.

We haven’t seen the legal docs yet, but named in the lawsuit: Chris Ferguson, Mike Matusow, Howard Lederer, and Phil Ivey (a November Niner).

From TMZ.com:

Poker Legends Sued for Robot Fraud

For all the obvious attempted shakedowns and plausibly legit payment beefs, this one (not sure how much they are seeking in damages) could be downright fascinating — on its surface at least — because it cuts to some key issues that are super-relevant to the past, present, and future of online poker … where the decisions any court renders (assuming there’s at least a smidgen of factual basis for the claim) affect not just the plaintiffs and defendants, but 10s of thousands if not millions of players.

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So this Face the Ace lawsuit … yeah … you’ve got a lone amateur TV-show concept-creator trying to take on (lawyers for) PokerPROductions and NBC with claims that they stole his legally protected idea to put out a ratings-bomb game show … and therefore owe him $85 million.

OK.

Similarities between Brandon McSmith’s video pitch for All Star Poker Challenge and Face the Ace are one thing … and this video, shot outside what appears to be Poker PROductions studios in Las Vegas and posted on YouTube in July (and pointed out to us by a reader yesterday) is another:

Umm …

Click below to read the rejection letter sent almost two years earlier from Poker PROductions honcho Mori Eskandani that may or may not have put McSmith on tilt:

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