Former EPT Grand Final Champ Glen Chorny Sues Poker Battle Founder Philippe Rouas

[Shizzmoney]

Great reporting here by Haley Hintze. I remember seeing these awful shirts and jerseys back in 2009 at the NBC HU championship. The Grinder would often wear this crap at the Foxwoods tournaments as well that year.

It looks like someone jizzed on the logo.

The thing was, the whole Poker World / Poker Battle concept was one of those propositions that looked like a beached whale from the start, not that I was exactly allowed to air those opinions. It couldn’t have been hard to find a “poker pro” willing to accept a check for tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for wearing the cheesy and exorbitantly overpriced “Poker Battle” gear, and I don’t think that one player in a hundred even thought the shirts and such were stylish or attractive.

(And yes, it was another failed poker venture that once had Michael Mizrachi as an endorser. That guy’ll rep anything for a paycheck, it’s always seemed; the “Grinder” seems to have exactly his nickname’s effect on poker-business startups, but that’s a reminiscence for another time.)

Still, the whole Poker Battle thing as a profit-making venture seemed sketchy at best, or at least that’s the way I saw it, way back in 2008. That left that horrid clothing line as Poker Battle’s only concrete revenue stream, as if tens of thousands of style-deficient poker players were queuing up just to buy it.

It’s sad to see that someone as talented as Chorny may well have his poker career waylaid by his involvement with Poker Battle, if his allegations are indeed true. And it’s also a story that in poker, the sharks are often everywhere, not just at the table.

The site is still up. And this comes up, hilarious posthumous, in the opening gif:

As far as anyone knew, Poker Battle was a crap-ass concept that was dead by sometime in 2009. And all this, this lawsuit seven years later, is the seeming evidence that Chorny was a big-time mark and he was gutted by Rouas for a good chunk of his net worth. It’s hard to fathom that Chorny somehow convinced himself for several years after the fact that Poker Battle was still viable, when even a middling level of digging on the net would have shown that things really weren’t what they seemed.

Poker players are really some of the worst investors on Earth. That being said, the only thing else they are bad at is not recognizing when someone is trying to roll them (see: Micon).

http://www.flushdraw.net/news/misc/o...hilippe-rouas/

[Crowe Diddly]

pic looks like ICP album cover art.