Probably should do some type of profit sharing while she grinds 5/10. Like every 10k she wins she keeps 4k and 6k goes to makeup.

Though in retrospect maybe you should of just gave her like a 10-15% freeroll in the big game as long as you trust her to not spew to try to win a lot and play legit.

I'm very surprised at the negative reactions in the thread towards chad, he's been hugely screwed over here without a shadow of a doubt.

He's been screwed over in quite a few ways and some of them are just price of business and some of them are Cate directly screwing him over.

1. Cate broke the basic terms of the staking agreement by her behaviour, there is a default agreement that the horse will put the hours in to alleviate the long term variance as much as possible and to work hard to produce a return on the money. She effectively just punted to try spin up on someone elses money, regardless of intentions (which may well have been good) this is however just bad luck on Chad's part, his job is to select horses who won't behave like this, and pick people to invest in who will return him a profit, and in this instance he did not do that successfully.

2. Cate is using the guise of quitting poker, which very obviously she is not, to expel the responsibility of having to repay the make-up should she wish to leave the stake, which it seems to me VERY obvious she agreed too. This is 1) totally out of line, and 2) totally fine in the lines of the "law".

3. Yet to return $1300 bankroll, that's just stealing any wya you look at it - a point that has been totally over-looked due to the small sum of money it is.

She claimed Chad was refuting the arbitrators decision, yet she made the twitter post, and the as far as I can see Chad accepted from a very early point that his $60k was toasted and seems to have made peace with it. Cate is massively out of line here, she seems so wrapped up in herself that she probably thinks she's in the right too, and whereas you can make compelling legal/technical defence of all her actions, it doesn't make it right.

UL Chad, what can you do. Hope she leaves poker and finds something that she can be successful at again, I'd bet 1.01 she'll be back playing poker in the next 6 months and probably with someone elses money.

Not sure if it's already been suggested but a possible compromise solution is if she offered him 5% of all live tournament cashes she has for the next 3 years where the cashing amount exceeds the buy in. E.g. $5K buy in, cashes for $4k he gets $0, she cashes for $17K he gets $600.

If they negotiated this and he accepted it capped at an aggregate of say $40K, so when $40K is paid back or 3 years has passed, whichever happens first, it's over, then he'll guarantee something back, perhaps alot, and perhaps quickly if she binks soon.

Sounds great but chad doesn’t want to give her anymore money and cate is broke so yeah, she’s probably going to look for someone else to stake her and in that situation won’t be giving chad back any money

I probably didn't describe it clearly.

He would not be giving her any money at all, he would release her from the cash game stake in exchange for the 5% of per comp profits on all of her live comps for 3 years capped at an aggregate of $40K.

He isn't funding the comps in any way, it's just what she happens to play, funded by herself or by other backers or a combination of these.

It's similar in concept to when a company gives an employee some share options which only get exercised (have value) when good results happen.

why would she **** someone and then give him a freeroll on her play?

The way this should have been handled is very straightforward, she would go to Chad, say that she is disengaged from poker and doesn't want to continue playing intensively and would like to leave the stake while she figures it out - what's fair? He might have said NO, get yourself grinding, or NO only if you give me $60k today, both would have been inside of his staking terms but would have been extremely harsh and shown a real lack of empathy.

I suspect from what he's said about other horses he would have given her some sort of offer, its speculative though as she never gave him the chance she just said, I'm quitting, see ya later, thanks for the spin UL on the $60k.

That would have been the gentle(wo)manly way to handle the situation on both sides.

There s no way backing Cate at this point is +EV.
The need to pay makeup rule is unenforcable so it shouldnt even be considered in the dispute because it open way too many unreasonnable factors:
- Horse can lose money to pressure the backer into stopping the deal
- Backer cannot reasonnably ask the horse to drop down and cover huge makeup at unreasonnably low limits.

Chad mistake here(appart from staking her in the first place maybe) was trying to enforce his stupid rule instead of simply dropping cate and posting about the bad experience he had with her to warn potential backers which would have been super reasonnable.

Huge +1, one of the best and most accurate written posts ITT.

t's extremely duplicitous and conniving for you to on the one hand use really really big fancy, words and on the other hand just make stuff up and pull other stuff out of your arse.

Please post where she said she was going to play poker because it was more lucrative.

Several interesting posts ITT about staking arrangements' flaws / possible improvements therein. Maybe some good comes from the discussion for those in that world.

Other posts just dumping on Cate as a human is really bad form and says more about you as a human than her. Flame away all you internet tough guys.

Sorry to bring you the reality, but she is very capable of dumping on herself through her own actions,creating a picture of herself that is clearly not ancored in the reality (high level crusher who regarding to herself left a 500K attorney position to travel the world to play cards, and then suddenly needs a stake for 5/10 when the heater she was on ended),-she does not need posters ITT in order to do that.

I have big respect for mental problems, drug problems and being in a life crisis. That is a different conversation though, and it doesent change what many posters feel about her creating a false non true image for herself in the pokerworld that is slowly getting shattered into pieces. Same as with alot of other people my bad vibes gutfeeling was instantly up when Cate bursted onto the pokerscene, and as proven countless times my gutfeeling rarely fails me.

White knight to the rescue!

played with her and chad many times and never thought she was very good. uncreative and predictable with sizing leaks and makes bad reads on the river. folds way too often to rivers imo

i like chad a lot, he's a great player and i get the feeling he stakes some people out of kindness and altruism...he really is that nice

very dangerous to play against but he should have known she wasn't that good.

if you can't quit poker while on a stake you are a slave

Makeup is definitely a problem area to deal with in staking and whatever it says on paper, it usually requires a staker to be flexible and come up with solutions that are appropriate for the player circumstance to have any chance of working.

To all those hating on stakers, I can tell you that while some horses turn out great and are a pleasure to work with ~ a greater number turn out to suck at life even more than they suck at poker. Ultimately, they all get combined as part of a stable and a total ROI drops out the other end. If that number is too low for the risk involved, the staker will simply start doing something else. For every guy that sends in 1%+ every week, there's another guy in insurmountable makeup (or has had 15 grandparents die that year)

Ofc a staker should take as much care as possible in selecting horses, but inevitably you make good and bad picks along the way. Sometimes due to talent, but as that is normally easily measurable, it is more likely due to them being lazy and/or making poor choices off the tables. On occasion fault can lie with a backer for insisting players play in games that they are not ready for, or can't cope with the possible outcomes.

please post some links or any other info not pulled out of your arse where she claims to be a high level crusher.

apparently not

Cate Hall ..The girl who cried wolf - cautionary tale of an ordinary poker player that couldn't come to terms with her mediocrity.

Watch as she swindles and drugs her way through a hellfire of negative variance.

Variance once again comes out on top in this riveting story of human struggle for meaning and money in the vast randomness that surrounds us.

Good post.

When I have (very reluctantly) been involved in non expiring makeup deals, it has always been the case that if the horse quits poker their makeup is erased.

Another practice is selling the makeup to a different staker at a discount, if they want to continue in poker. I'm undecided on whether this lack of termination conditions is a feature or a bug of the makeup system, but it sure leads to a lot of complications. I believe what happens is that if a staking deal is considered exploitative by the horse, they'll often just leave, and then their ex-staker tries to ruin their reputation such that the poker world is inhospitable for them. Since the initial contract is likely unenforceable, the reaction of the community of stakers ends up deciding what sort of options they have for staking in the future. Messy! There's also of course always grey area, say the horse gets a real job and decides to play a recreational tourney at the WSOP every summer. What happens then? It seems crazy the ex-staker gets the action. What if they play in a +EV homegame every Friday with their new work colleagues? I donno, still seems odd that the staker gets any action but it could be debated.

Makeup gets traded far less often (in conventional backer channels) than it ever did and when it does change hands, it usually trades at a much smaller % than in previous years.


If I were a potential horse, I'd definitely want control/input of any clauses that could sell me on to a third party. But the reality is, a lot of horses don't even read what they are sent ~ you could put that they have to sell a kidney in para 2 and it would get signed.


When situations come up, reasonable backers discuss it with reasonable horses and solutions usually get agreed. If either side tries to push the boundaries too hard, it usually ends up somewhere on here or in NF. Once a backer no longer trusts a player, the stake is largely untenable and it is time to try and invoke alternative arrangements, ideally those laid out in the agreement in writing beforehand.

Nice pots about the TASMU btw, the obvious flaw to it ofc is that many requesting a stake don't have the $$ to entertain it.

if you can't quit poker while on a stake you are more like an indentured servant than a slave.

However, she could quit, barring a repeal of the 13th Amendment; she just retains a likely unenforceable liability if she does.

Grace Jones - Slave to the River

Couple things:

1) If this story had come out and the details remained the same except the horse behind these actions wasn't an established name like "Cate Hall", but instead was just some random unknown guy - 100% of everyone in this thread would be united against these actions and on board calling the horse a scammer.

2) The most practical outcome at this point is to settle upon a reduced debt amount (say 20k) and have Cate work that debt off at 2/5. The reason this is the best outcome is because it's an obtainable figure that might only take 2-6 months for her to achieve. Also, there's no proof she can beat 5/T but she would clearly stand a much better chance at a softer 2/5 level. She will have to swallow her pride and ego, but she absolutely owes some sort of effort and sweat to pay some of this debt off.

3) She could be technically correct about everything regarding the details of the staking arrangement (she isn't) and still be scumming Chad by not committing any effort to putting in volume for him - especially after getting so buried. What decent person loses a ton of someone else's money and then shows no remorse or effort to pay them back? And instead the only thing she's worried about is selfishly weasling her way out of her responsibility to the mess she's made and dragging Chad's name through the mud. Pretty disgusting.

I see what you're going for here.

Well played. Very well played.

I think this is most likely true.

It was a novelty IMO when she emerged as a feminine nice looking woman whose aggressive playing style is more associated usually with male players and at the same time as someone aligned politically/socially with the in crowd of cool 20s/early 30s higher stakes players.

This made her in the eyes of many "cool", and when quickly producing some great live MTT results her coolness rating was multiplied, all of which may have clouded some people's judgement about her playing skill and her status in the poker community.

Hopefully she's stopped this. I really like Cate.

Played with her a couple times in cash games in Vegas. Was not impressed. No surprise that she is now busto.

This is just stupid. There was a lot of negative sentiment towards Cate Hall in NVG before this happened and the criticism of her actions here are full of personal details being used against her. A random unknown guy would get a more unbiased judgement than she does.