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Gordon Vayo Lawsuit Concluded After PokerStars Drops Claim

It appears that PokerStars is in the giving mood and has given Gordon Vayo an early Christmas present. According to an article on Flushdraw.net, Rational Entertainment Enterprises Limited (REEL) has agreed to drop their lawsuit against him. PokerStars had been seeking damages and legal expenses from Vayo over his lawsuit against them.

You Scratch Our Back – We’ll Scratch Yours

In case you missed it, back in May 2018, Gordon Vayo filed a lawsuit against REEL regarding tournament earnings frozen by PokerStars. Vayo had won a SCOOP Event back in May 2017 but PokerStars froze his winnings, claiming that he was playing over a VPN and that his original location had been in the United States.

Vayo had initially denied that he was playing from the United States and submitted documentation that supposedly proved that he was in Canada playing the SCOOP event, not in the US. However, after filing the lawsuit, PokerStars was able to uncover evidence that proved that Vayo had provided forged documents. REEL was able to get Vayo’s forger to admit to the falsified documents and PokerStars confronted Vayo and his legal team regarding the matter.

Vayo’s legal team subsequently proceeded to drop the lawsuit and then resigned from representing him. PokerStars then filed a claim in court seeking damages and legal expenses against Vayo. Now all that is going away because Vayo has agreed to amend his lawsuit.

Initially, Vayo’s legal team had dropped the suit with prejudice, which means that Vayo had the legal right to pursue the matter again in the future. REEL has agreed to drop their claim against Vayo since he went back and amended his suit and dropped it without prejudice, meaning he will not be able to pursue the matter again in the future.

You can view this as an early Christmas present to Vayo because the evidence against him was pretty convincing – convincing enough for him to drop the initial suit and his legal team to fire him as a client.

Did REEL Make This Move to Improve Their Image?

As Haley Hintze of Flushdraw pointed out, this move was not necessary by PokerStars as it was more than likely that they would win the lawsuit. So why make this move? There are a couple of reasons they could have chosen to do so.

The first being that the company has already received a ton of bad press from poker fans in recent years to policy changes and the general direction the company has been taken in recent years. While it appears that Vayo was more the villain than PokerStars, there are many that still view this matter as one where PokerStars is trying to screw over players. Granted, Vayo is not going to see a penny of his earnings, but he is likely going to escape any legal penalties over his alleged forgery.

Another potential reason that PokerStars might have made this move is their continued expansion into the regulated online gambling market in the United States. Just recently, the company was granted a license to offer online poker, table games, and slots in Pennsylvania.

The company is expected to continue expansion as other iGaming markets open and you can expect them to attempt expansion into states where sports betting becomes legal in the near future. This could simply be a matter that just isn’t that important considering the grand scheme of things for the company. Better to let this matter drop and let it fade from memory.

The question now remains what impact this will have on Gordon Vayo’s poker career. While he didn’t cheat at poker, he is now pegged as a potential forger, which raises serious questions about his character. Will he be able to move forward past this and prove himself to be a trustworthy player at the table or will this be the start of him fading from the general poker consciousness?

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