Poker News Roundup - Week Ending June 10, 2010
by Bodog Poker | Jun 11 2010
Feldman Loses UK High Court CaseBritish pro Andrew Feldman lost his case in the UK High Court this week and has been ordered to pay Rabbi Simon Nissim a total of £136,000. Nissim and Feldman had met in 2007 through a Jewish charitable organization and became friends through a love of the game. Feldman had lost a staggering £700,000+ in the span of week while playing
online poker and Nissim offered his spread betting account to Feldman to help recover his losses. The court stated that the pair agreed that Mr. Nissim would make spread bets on the Wall Street index, giving Feldman any profits made and Mr. Feldman would indemnify Nissim against any losses.
The dispute centers around the number of bets placed by Nissim and the way funding was to be used. Feldman claims that they had agreed to four to five bets per session, but Nissim had placed 77 bets in a single four-hour period. The court stated:
"The undisputed facts provide more than sufficient grounds upon which to conclude that Mr. Feldman agreed to indemnify Mr. Nissim and acknowledged that the amounts claimed by Mr. Nissim fell within the scope of the agreed indemnity."
The judge added: "Mr. Feldman suggests that if the net result had been a positive one (on spread betting), Mr. Nissim would have claimed the bets for himself; but that because net losses were made, Mr. Nissim 'had retrospectively sought to allocate to me bets that he in fact made on his own behalf'."
Van der Sloot Confesses to MurderPeruvian police have stated that poker player Joran van der Sloot has confessed to the murder of a 21-year-old woman in a hotel room in Lima. Van der Sloot stated that he broke Stephany Flores’ neck after she grabbed his laptop and discovered that he was involved in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.
La Republica newspaper quoted the Dutch citizen as saying “I did not want to do it. The girl intruded into my private life... she didn't have any right. I went to her and I hit her. She was scared, we argued and she tried to escape. I grabbed her by the neck and hit her."
Security video from the hotel shows Flores and van der Sloot entering his hotel room together and his solo departure four hours later. Flores’s body was found on the floor two days later and by that point, van der Sloot had entered Chile, where he was arrested Thursday.
Natalee Holloway’s father Dave told Good Morning America that he hoped van der Sloot would reveal what happened to his daughter. “We’re hoping this is the end of the line for him,” Holloway said in the phone interview. In addition to his Peruvian arrest, van der Sloot was charged in the US with trying to extort a quarter of a million dollars from Holloway’s family in exchange for her body’s location and how she died.
If convicted of Flores’ murder, van der Sloot faces a potential 35-year prison term.
