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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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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