Matt Stout is known to many as a winning poker player who also raises money for charity. The truth was revealed this week in awful technicolor, as the in-debt Stout’s physical and verbal assault of an 18-year-old female was laid bare on X for all to see.
Should we have seen it? Perhaps not. But now we can’t unsee it; how should the poker community react to the actions of one of its players?
This week should see the inglorious collapse of a once-proud poker career. Instead, ‘Poker Twitter’ – itself under the recent disastrous change of X that came from male ego gone wrong – played host to the story of Matt Stout. Not the media-friendly, poker-promoting tale of a winning player, but the unvarnished truth. The physically abusive debtor caught in a plughole spiral born of his own actions.
How Matt Stout Showed His True Colors
The footage released this week by Aaron ‘Daliman’ O’Rourke on X, formerly known as Twitter, was shocking in the extreme. Matt Stout, a well-known poker player with over $4 million in live results, was physically and mentally abusive to O’Rourke’s 18-year-old daughter in the midst of a poker home game.
The object of Stout’s ire became O’Rourke’s daughter due to Stout’s apparent dislike of his ex-girlfriend Katie Morgan turning up at the house to drop the 18-year-old home.
Morgan, a former adult movie actress, went on to detail how abusive Stout was in their relationship in a later post, which we’ll come to, but at this stage, the evening clearly descended into madness. Punches were thrown by Stout and scuffles headed to the floor of O’Rourke and his daughter’s home.
At one point, O’Rourke’s daughter asked the excellent question: “Do you think it’s fun for me to be the bigger person to a grown ass man?”
Stout, undeterred, just kept raging in foul language we won’t repeat here, while O’Rourke senior said: “You owe me 20-grand and you’re going to talk to my f*****g daughter like that?”
Since the debacle, Stout has fled to visit his terminally ill father while O’Rourke – and presumably Morgan – have been left to pick up the pieces back home.
The poker world has reacted to the videos and story in a number of ways, many of them troubling, so let’s break down each party and how their actions affected the wider world of the poker public.
Aaron O’Rourke’s Role
Whilst the videos being aired provide transparency to the proceedings, they don’t paint O’Rourke in the most glorious of lights either. In what world is keeping your daughter in the room with an abusive, losing gambler like Stout remotely a good idea?
Everyone can understand a friend going out of their way to help their fellow man, but if a friend of mine had been abusive to his girlfriend to the extent Stout sounds like he has been to Morgan, then abused my daughter, I’d have reported him to the police and sought to protect those he had affected out of personal guilt and shame.
‘By a man’s friends do you know him’, as the phrase goes, and Aaron O’Rourke simply must have better friends than this in his life. If not, he needs to look at his own role in this story.
On the private home game side of things, when will people learn? Stop playing home games that feature stakes that are anything other than amounts that you are happy to win or lose to those friends.
Why is someone who is $20,000 in the hole being invited to a private home game? To make an example of him and belittle his losses? Or to win it back at your expense rather than putting together a repayment plan born out of honest work?
You could spit in any direction and probably hit a poker club. Head down there and play a regulated game, not some two-bit version in your own home because you’re, what, too cheap to pay rake?
Step it up, and no, not in the weird way that some X folks seem to think is OK. Physical retribution should not have been taken by O’Rourke on Stout in front of his daughter. That sets a terrible example. You pay taxes so that you can call the police when this sort of thing goes down. So call them!
“I have thought long and hard about what happened between Matt Stout and I late last Tuesday night, but after talking to multiple people I have decided that I am going to come forward with information,” O’Rourke said. What, on X? Give these tapes to the police and let them handle it out of the public realm.
Katie Morgan’s Role
One of the most common questions posted in response to Katie Morgan’s punctuation-free tirade against her former partner centered around a corrective disbelief that she could ever have been attracted to Matt Stout as a partner in the first place.
That mystery is not solved in her rant but isn’t really the issue. Whenever a partner we once found ourselves attracted to looks anything but, we often think: ‘What on Earth did I find attractive about them?’ It is a question we ask ourselves, but it isn’t one that needs to come from others.
That the two share a child is the salient point.
Given the litany of abusive behavior she details about Stout in the public post, the fact that until this point she hasn’t gone to the authorities is shocking if true. If she has told these facts to the police, then announcing everything on X doesn’t help her cause.
It’s easy to give advice on others’ lives, but if the abuse she details is true, then both reporting these actions to those in authority and following them up to their deserved conclusion seems the only right thing to do.
A great parent friend once told me that they make every decision as if their kid is sitting on their shoulder watching what they do. There is no better example to set for your child than by doing the right thing, especially if it’s the hard thing.
Katie Morgan is not to blame for Matt Stout being an abusive partner because no one else is to blame for that person’s actions other than him, but she has a pivotal role in how this tragic set of circumstances plays out in the near future by either reporting his actions to the police or not. We have already seen the result of not doing so up to this point.
Matt Stout’s Role
The responsibility for all of the above falls on Matt Stout. Frankly, some of the comments on X chill me and other fathers to the bone. They mostly seem to land on the following phrase, which is a direct quote of one response.
“Hopefully he can get the help he obviously needs.”
No one could argue that Matt Stout is in his right mind in these moments. He clearly has mental health issues that are deeper than, say, a $20,000 debt, but he is acting under his own control and intentions, and the fact that helping Stout would be many people’s first course of action is extremely concerning.
Female poker players make up 5% of the field when they should be 50%. When companies who pour billions into marketing the game to female players wonder why the gap between 5% and 50% is so hard to bridge, it often comes down to a fact that nobody likes to hear: we are enabling abusive men to continue to act how they like without consequence.
Female players aren’t stupid. They don’t like that, and that is a core reason why they stay away. For every inspirational figure like Kristen Foxen or Cherish Andrews, there are hundreds of complete idiots like this guy.
We’ve all seen Rounders. When Mike loses his stack, he gets in the damn truck. If you’ve lost all your money playing poker, then more fool you. You went too big, and you got taught a lesson by players who were better than you.
Better at bankroll management. Better at poker. That stings, right? Ouch. It happens. It’s happened to the best of them, but they didn’t start throwing stuff around other people’s houses or being abusive to people. And if they did, can you guess how much help they’d have been given by acquaintances to keep acting that way? Zero.
Poker is littered with current players who make promises to pay back debts by a certain time, then fall short. Gutless and unaccountable, these players are what is holding the game of poker back. Players like Matt Stout.
Who is lending them money? It amazes me that astute people who are capable of strategies at the poker felt are unable to process and act upon one of the oldest phrases known to man: ‘never a borrower or a lender be.’ Matt Stout has no excuse to have been physically or verbally abusive, and no matter what is going on in his private life, it simply doesn’t justify how he has acted.
Paying for these actions should come before any of his self-improvement. That shouldn’t be carried out at others’ expense, only his own.
Caitlin Comeskey put it well on X when she said: “The amount of you willing to record on this website with your full name and photo that you’re more okay with verbally and physically abusing women than you are with me publicly condemning the behavior is astonishing. Hope the women in your life know you feel this way.”
Matt Stout’s actions are reprehensible, and no amount of visiting sick relatives or crying mental health issues should make any difference to how anyone should feel for him watching this footage or reading the awful way he has apparently conducted himself.
Add to this that Stout is involved with a poker charity and the story gets worse. You might think that being involved with a charity can only be a good thing. Google Jimmy Savile and charity work and you’ll be swiftly disavowed of that belief. Charitable acts can often act as excellent cover for awful people to conduct themselves very differently behind closed doors.
Brian Kip, Vice President of the Charity Series of Poker (CSOP), told PokerNews this week:
We are aware of the video involving our founder and president that is circulating online and are conducting an internal investigation. The actions depicted do not reflect the values or mission of Charity Series of Poker.
Our organization remains committed to bringing communities together to raise critical funds and awareness for the nonprofit organizations we proudly support. Our focus remains on serving our charitable partners, donors, volunteers, and the communities that rely on our collective efforts.
That ‘internal investigation’ would last about 10 seconds if I were VP of any kind of charity. Consequences are vital if any credibility is to remain.
The story of Matt Stout holds a mirror up to many in the poker world, including many who look to excuse his abhorrent behavior. The person himself – no father of a female child could call him a man – should face justice for the violence and abuse he has put out there in the world.
Only then can the right things start to happen for all concerned.
