When to go public about a $1.7 million poker debt
Barry Carter looks at the recent Mike Matusow vs Ted Forrest debate and asks if going public about a poker debt makes it more or less likely you will get paid?
This month the normally quite shy Ted Forrest took to Twitter to publicly call out Mike Matusow on not paying over $1.7 million owed to him from a prop bet. Ted famously lost an extreme amount of weight in 2010 to win the prop bet.
Mike agreed to pay Ted in monthly $5,000 instalments but according to Ted, has thus far only paid $70,000 of the bet. This has sparked a very public debate between the two about what terms were agreed at the time, and Matusow is blaming the decline of Full Tilt for his none payment.
I don’t want to get into the specifics of Ted and Mike’s situation because it is highly subjective and contextual between the two. It does make me consider an interesting wider point, however – should we go public when someone welches on a poker debt?
Name and shame
The short answer is yes. The poker community has for a long time been vulnerable to scammers, and I for one am happy to see we have adopted a culture of naming and shaming wrong doers. The frequency that this happens perhaps paints poker to be a lot shadier than it is (Just like any news channel paints the world to be a lot more tragic than it actually is), but if that helps to put off potential scammers, then it is a necessary evil.
Poker is still very much a handshake industry and one’s reputation is highly important in a game where money passes around so freely. So publicly outing someone for none payment of debts is going to add a lot of pressure on that player to do the right thing, when otherwise they may have happily swept it under the carpet.
The threat of going public
However, there comes with it a risk. The biggest tool you have in your arsenal when trying to get back money you are owed is the threat of going public. Once you do go public, the damage is mostly done to the player’s reputation. The fear thereafter is that they will be less incentivised to pay you back, or you will at least be further behind in the queue of creditors.
This is probably why Ted Forrest waited four years before he broke his silence on the subject. This was also the main reason cited by a lot of players whom are owed money by Erick Lindgren for not reporting his debts publicly sooner. He had a solid reputation at the time, and they were fearful that being the person who dented his reputation would cause him to not pay out of spite.
Sadly, I know all to well what this feeling is like. Several years ago a magazine called Gambling Exclusive owed me €7,000 and it took me a very long time to admit to myself I wasn’t getting paid. Not only did I hold off from going public about it, I actually worked for them for way too long without payment. I was so fearful that a misstep on my part would result in not getting paid. In the end I went ballistic (I made a member of staff there cry, which I am secretly proud of) and I later discovered they were actually shady from the start, and went out of business. I never got paid, and in hindsight, I was never going to.
The longer you wait, the worse it gets
I understand completely why anyone would want to avoid going public when they are owed money. It really sucks having to put extra effort into getting that money back when it was yours to begin with. It would be pretty stupid to name and shame someone if it has only been a couple of weeks or even months, because there can be genuine reasons for none payment.
However, the longer you leave it, the more frustrating it gets. The longer you leave it, the clearer it becomes the other person has no respect for what they owe you. The longer you leave it, the less your threat of exposing them publicly holds weight. And finally, the longer you leave it, the more you will wish you had gone public sooner.
How should the poker community police people who don’t pay debts? What is a reasonable amount of time to wait before going public on a debt? Let me know in the comments box.
