Are people still planning to support this event? Seems very wrong, given the awful way the final 27 were robbed of their equity last year.

Day 1A started today, 545 entries so far.

Robbed by whom?

Lusardi? Yes. But he will not be allowed to return.

Gaming enforcement, who arranged the payout? Maybe. But they did what they believed to be fair.

Borgata? No. They were required to do what gaming enforcement instructed them to do.

Borgata has since taken steps to ensure that this does not happen again.

http://www.destinationamerica.com/tv...feit-chips.htm

Decent episode about somewhat successful chip counterfeiters

yea, but that guy was stealing from the Casino, while Lusardi was just stealing/cheating Poker Players, so I doubt the sentence is anything even close to that

Christian Lusardi Receives Five-Year Sentence in Federal Plea Deal

http://www.flushdraw.net/misc/christ...ral-plea-deal/

Cliffs: They threw out the poker charges in favor of a plea deal on the DVD bootlegging which brought in $1.3 million.
From: http://www.justice.gov/usao/nce/pres...15-mar-31.html

HIT EM WITH THE BOOK!!

ENJOY THOSE 5 YEARS BRAH!

Someone more familiar w/ the US criminal justice system than me: a 5-year jail sentence for a non-violent crime (DVD-bootlegging in this case, I guess) > how long will he realistically be locked up for? When's he eligible for parole?

There's no such thing as parole when it comes to federal crimes. Parole in the federal system was abolished/eliminated back when Reagan was President. (Although people convicted prior to the effective date of the change in the law are still technically eligible to be paroled.)

There is federal good conduct time, which is about 54 days per year.

The Bureau of Prison calculates this at 87.1% of a total sentence.

5 years - good time = 4.3 years.

He can also serve the last 12 months or 10% of his sentence, whichever is less, at a halfway house and after he completes half of his placement at a halfway house, he may be considered for the home incarceration program.

Basically he does no time whatsoever for borgata crimes if I'm reading this right.

In a technical sense only, Allen. I didn't want to take that piece too far sideways from being a straight news story, but there were three different pre-sentencing reports submitted for consideration, which means Lusardi's other activities were being presented as qualifying circumstances. The content of those is not publicly available.

The judge in these cases determines the sentence from a wide range of possible punishments, and a five-year term for the two counts he pled guilty to must have been near the top of the severity scale for those charges, which means the other stuff was likely factored in. That the Borgata case amounted to only a few thousand dollars of tournament payouts that he actually stole through his actions may also have been part of it. A lot of other players suffered larger losses through the chaos he caused, but his theft from the Borgata was smallish in $$ compared to the other stuff.

IMO charges were dropped because it wasn't that big of a deal in the eyes of justice and his sentence would most likely have just been run concurrently so why waste the time and resources on something that really doesn't matter when they can just get him to plea out to the more serious crime. It was probably part of the plea deal that those charge were dropped.

Anyone have any idea if he could face a civil suit from the Borgata players?


What I don't get is how the **** do you get 1.3 million in a Paypal account selling fake DVD's? I don't know the "retail" price on bootleg DVD's but if it was $5 he had to have sold 260000 DVDs. If he was supplying them to wholesalers it would probably be less than $5.

This too. Forgot to include that.

Lusardi now indicted

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/n....html?mode=jqm

They are either aggrandizing the story or the author has no clue (and did little research) about the difference between tournament chips and cash. They are saying that he brought $2.7 million in counterfeit chips but don't mention they are tournament chips.

Well, this one is finally over:

http://news.yahoo.com/man-admits-bri...173424871.html

5 years.

Still can't get over the fact that he thought his best move to cover his tracks was flushing hundreds of chips down the toilet in a major AC hotel.

He hit the flush

Ya but his opponent rivered the joint.

Wow he got wrecked. Manslaughter is not much higher than that. Funny how many poker players / scammers have ****ed up people's lives and nothing happens. Give a big company a headache and you are treated like a killer.

Seriously harsh sentence if you ask me.

Being previously convicted of trademark counterfeiting allows for the maximum penalty to be doubled from 10 years to 20.

He was previously convicted and received a 5 year sentence for the DVDs. [justice.gov]

He got off lucky.

It's misleading for sure but it said lower that they aren't cash value.