Gordon Vayo lost court case against PokerStars

American Gordon Vayo, finalist of the 2016 World Series of Poker and the winner of the SCOOP tournament held a year later, has every chance to experience by his own example how painful a defeat that changed from victory can be. In principle, it could be reduced to the fact that he himself is to blame for what happened, but in reality everything is not so simple.

The background is as follows: Gordon won the tournament and was going to withdraw the prize money, which amounted to almost 700 thousand dollars, but PokerStars blocked his account and reset his account. The fact is that US citizen Vayo was not eligible to participate in the poker tournament held by Pokerstarsdirectly from home as prohibited by US law. Therefore, he had, according to him, to leave for Canada, where there are no such restrictions.

However, the PokerStars administration suspected something was wrong and took appropriate action, and then the offended player went to court. In a fit of righteous indignation, he not only wrote a statement of claim, but also backed it up with documents, in particular, bills for the Internet from a Canadian provider operating in Canada, and an extract from a Canadian bank account - they say, I really played while in Canada.

But Pokerstars would not be the most powerful corporation if he was so gullible. Lawyers from Quinn Emmanuel Urqhuart & Sullivan hired by the room spent about three and a half hundred working hours to find the truth (this is not counting couriers and other administrative costs).

They ended up invoicing nearly $ 280,000, to which PokerStars added another eight they spent. Thus, in total, Vayo received a counterclaim for $287000, which, no doubt, will be satisfied. He also had to withdraw his own statement, so that the total amount of his losses will be about a million. And all because Gordon Vayo tried to cheat by submitting fake documents to the court!

As it turned out, someone referred to in the case as a "third party" managed to obtain evidence that the above statement was in fact tied to a Californian bank, and the provider - yes, this one was from Canada, only the American player connected to his networks via VPN- compound. Naturally, Vayo has already withdrawn his lawsuit, but he will have to pay on the PokerStars bills: the room is not going to give slack, but, on the contrary, is in a serious mood and intends to see the case through.

The poker community as a whole is on the side of PokerStars, but not so much out of a love of justice, but because of the meager mind of their colleague. According to the Belgian player with the nickname Girafganger, who took second place in the notorious tournament, going with photoshopped documents against an international company is the height of imprudence. And another “sympathizer” known as #notGTO recalled Wyoh how he played badly in the 2016 WSOP final: if you failed to bluff your opponent (then it was Ki Nguyen), how can you hope that you have will it work with PokerStars?