The poker community is never without drama, and this week it took an especially stupid turn, featuring a weird and petty dispute between severely disabled poker pro KL Cleeton and high maintenance Asian chick Kitty Kuo.

Cleeton has had spinal muscular atrophy his entire life, which eventually rendered everything below the neck non-functional, though he has a tiny bit of movement in his fingers which allows him to control his wheelchair. However, he is unable to physically play poker, despite being an intelligent guy who is otherwise capable of competing at the game. Cleeton was first noticed five years ago, when Daniel Negreanu bought him into the Main Event. He is friends with Veronica Brill, and she organized a successful fundraiser to buy him a special van which was equipped to allow him to wheel in and out of it.

Cleeton is generally well liked, and has not been in controversy before. However, it's likely that very few people are willing to snipe at him on poker Twitter, as it's not exactly a good look to pick on a severely disabled guy.

Kitty Kuo is best known for her almost comically stereotypical Twitter account, where she writes in broken English and behaves almost exactly what you'd expect of a stereotype of a fresh-off-the-boat Asian woman. At first I thought her account was parody, but it wasn't. She often posts pictures of herself in a poker setting, but they're almost always heavily filtered through something called "Beauty Cam".

Kitty is a pro for Natural 8 Poker, which is a skin into GGPoker, aimed at the Asian market. Her Twitter bio reads, "My name is kitty kuo n I am a professional poker player,love eating,traveling,drinking,n seeing handsome man，cant handle disappoint at poker!"

https://twitter.com/kittykuopoker/status/1086791329839902720

There are some rumors that Kitty comes from family money.



This controversy occurred when both players were in the WSOP $5k NL 6-max event, which to be honest has quite a tough field. Cleeton requires an assistant in order to play live poker, which is usually his dad. (I've seen Veronica assist him before, as well.) This is allowed by card rooms, similar to how blind poker player Hal Lubarsky was allowed an assistant to play tournaments in the 2000s. The assistant looks at the cards, communicates them to Cleeton in some way, and Cleeton then verbalizes what he wants to do. The assistant then takes the physical action (checking, betting or folding) according to what Cleeton wants.

Kitty was in a bad mood for some reason (maybe not running well?), and was probably annoyed by being at Cleeton's table, as it slows down the game a bit. However, she lost her cool when the dealer twice misdealt due to accidentally giving cards to both Cleeton and his dad, not realizing they were one player. Kitty raised an objection to this, and the fireworks started. Here is Cleeton's description of what happened:

https://twitter.com/highhands89/status/1540594547234729984
https://twitter.com/highhands89/status/1540594549617152000
https://twitter.com/highhands89/status/1540594551886270464
https://twitter.com/highhands89/status/1540594554075680774

As you can see, Kitty eventually apologized to him and offered Cleeton 3% of her Main Event action as compensation for her rudeness to him, but this was only after she was shamed pretty hard on social media.

Initially, this was what she claimed happened:

https://twitter.com/kittykuopoker/status/1540453596252504065
https://twitter.com/kittykuopoker/status/1540481569647136768

Another woman accused Kitty of mistreating women at the poker table, and unearthed some old tweets bashing poker women:

https://twitter.com/Angry_Polak/status/1540474849998409728
https://twitter.com/Angry_Polak/status/1540486426394955776


Some people took Kitty's side, such as Shaun Deeb:

https://twitter.com/shaundeeb/status/1540509439303700481



I'll post my comments in the next message.