Quote:
Originally Posted by lawdude
The Campbell case is enforced a lot more strictly than that. In most cases, you can't get more than 1x actual damages. 2x is very, very rare, and reserved only for the most despicable conduct. 10x compensatories verdicts and judgments are routinely reversed.
Actual damages here are unlikely to be more than $250,000. That's what he took out of the game. There are some theories that could get plaintiffs a little more than that, but it would require a hand-by-hand expert analysis of what would have been won or lost had Postle played the hand normally, and that might get excluded as speculative.
The damages are very low here. There's just not much likelihood of getting around that.
This thread got me to finally register for an account and post...
Just a thought -- it would make sense for the plaintiffs to try to get damages from Stones as they are the deep pocket and a fraud theory would be the maximal outcome. I wonder if they could argue a theory that Stones encouraged and fostered the environment where Postle was propped up as the local hero who liked to gamble, and that induced other players to come play at Stones leading them to lose their money. Stone made a material misrepresentation that Postle was an action player who played fairly and created large, profitable games. The players relied upon this material misrepresentation to believe they were playing in a fair game and lost their money. If such a theory could be viable, they could claim actual damages for all money lost while they were there, not just the money they lost to Postle. There's a lot of evidence that the live streams promoted Postle as poker Jesus and Postle's style of play as being a unique characteristic of poker at Stones (I've seen numerous clips where the commentators make statements of this nature). Poker players like to play in action games as the potential financial benefit is usually greater in action games.
The hard part is to prove proximate injury as a result of the misrepresentation apart from what was lost to Postle. But then if you can have testimony about tilt and how large losing sessions can cause players to take on more risk and can increase losses.
It's a bit sketchy, but it could increase the amount of actual damages that can be accessed and target Stones. They really need to survive motion practice to ratchet up the settlement pressure.