Poker Poser Headed to Hoosegow

Here\’s a name from the past … and I hope I\’m not messing with the poker-karma river gods by taking delight in his misfortune praising their good work. Remember Robert Eon Marshall?

Last I heard he had disappeared and was on the run from the Feds. Well, the FBI caught him — and he\’s been sentenced to 10 years in prison (with no parole) and ordered to pay $900k in restitution for the people he defrauded with his failed online poker affiliate venture, WorldPokerParty.com.

Marshall (seen here at left, next to Sommer, en route to bubbling at the 2004 Pokerati Invitational), you may recall was the bombastic $2/$5 NLH maniac who reportedly made his fortune by hitting a $36 million Powerball. He also claimed to be the 20th ranked poker player in the world and bought himself a Super Bowl-style ring that said \”No Limit Hold\’em Champion.\” Very classy-sad, no?

More on Eon Marshall and his abrasive table demeanor here.

Beyond being the bearer of so many bad beats to so many better players, he also was connected to one of the first \”good folds\” I made in the poker biz … he had some money ready to go to start a poker magazine, and while I was excited about the possibility, in the end I decided this guy with assault rifles and glorious stone fountains in his South Arlington strip-mall office was just too shady to get in bed with — especially when I saw him yell at his daughter for putting stickers on poker chips the wrong way. It was the right read, because his whole business was a failed Enron-style investment scheme based around convincing old ladies to buy-in (and rebuy) into an online poker affiliate model that was going nowhere.

ALT HED: All Incarcerated

ED. NOTE: Eon had a limo driver whom I talked with at length a couple years ago … but I don\’t remember his name nor do I have his contact info handy. If someone has a clue who I am talking about and/or how to get in touch, please let me know.

Even more on good-ole Eon Marshall, from The Fat Guy:

– Let’s get the solitary stripper out of the way, shall we? One of the participants was a total dude name of Eon Marshall. The scuttlebutt was that this dude had won $40,000,000 in a Powerball lottery. DanM says that he has an online poker room, too. I don’t know any of this to be factual. What I can tell you is that he was the only guy there wearing a white suit, black shirt and a tie. He also wore about 10lbs. of gaudy gold jewelry, including the Super Bowl-class ring DanM mentions. But the hilarious part was his stripper girlfriend, whose name I didn’t get. She was about a foot taller than him, and her clear platform shoes made her about a foot and a half taller than him. She spent the entire tournament perched on the arm of his chair, cooing in his ear, rubbing his shoulders (and probably other things), and (dig this one, babies), taking her boobs out of her underwear everytime he went all-in. He’d say, “All-In!” (always with a great flourish), and then turn to her and say, “…and All-Out!” She’d giggle, and flop ‘em out. That was funny the first time, I’m sure. After that, for me, it got to be fairly annoying, which was likely the whole point of the ritual. I was fortunate and only had to play about three orbits (about 30 minutes) with the guy. I bet he went all-in six times in that span of time. All-in appeared to be his move of choice, anyway, and he had built up a nice fortress of chips with it. Another quirky aspect about the guy was his apparent inability not to think out loud. You know how when you get bet at, your mind runs through all the possibilities of what that bet might mean: bet size, stack size of the bettor, position, previous play, pre-flop v. post-flop, what time is it in the round, how many other players are in the pot, are dogs better than cats, is there life after death? Those kinds of things. Well, ol’ Eon seemed to have an undisconnectable engagement ‘twixt his brain and his mouth. All of that, and all of the digressions therefrom, had to be voiced out loud on Every. Single. Hand. Again, I don’t know if this was schtick, if it was a strategy, if it was his normal mode of play, if he was incapable of doing the computational & situational strategerizing internally, or what. But, from my seat, it was grating as hell — it slowed down the game tremendously. So did the flourish-filled countdown of his stacks on his regular all-ins…doing the dealer moves that they have to do to show they’re not palming chips but which are completely unnecessary when you’re counting your own checks. Tiresome, it were. If I had not been short-stacked, I might have been able to relax and let it slide, but I needed hands to play, and this dude was keeping me from getting them. GRRRR! Dan says he bubbled out, so I’ll take that as karmic payback. It’s not as if I intensely disliked the man, I just wanted some cards, and I didn’t want to have to wait for them, and he was dragging things out. Oh, yeah — the stripper? She was your basic generic, wavy-haired, eye-candy, stripper-from-metal-videos, drenched in perfume…you could smell her from 15 feet away…anyone know why they do that? All it does is make me think of the sailors of olde, who used copious amounts of Worcestershire sauce to cover the smell and taste of of slowly-rotting meat on their voyages.