Online Poker

One time poster girl for Full Tilt Poker, Clonie Gowen, has filed a lawsuit in the Nevada courts demanding $40 million.

Apparently Full Tilt Poker decided recently that Clonie was not a good representative of their brand, and ended their relationship with the former "Miss Teen McAlester".

This upset Gowen, whose full first name is "Cycalona", and she is claiming that an oral contract existed between herself and Tiltware, while admitting no written contract had ever been signed, and that most of the alleged promises took place over the telephone or in meetings with executives in Las Vegas in 2004.

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but my money would be on the Full Tilt people having their ducks in a line and dealing with this out of court if there is even the slightest chance they could lose. The terms of verbal contracts are hard to prove, but in civil cases you don't always have to actually prove anything....

Full Tilt has issued this statement:

"Tiltware, LLC, has been made aware of the recent filing of a meritless lawsuit by a former Full Tilt Poker endorser - Ms. Cycalona Gowen. All claims have no merit and there are many inaccuracies improperly and unlawfully asserted by Ms. Gowen within her frivolous complaint. Tiltware LLC expects that this lawsuit will be dealt with accordingly by a competent court in due course."

From the rumors doing the rounds at other poker forums, it sounds as though her termination was probably deserved. Personally I'll never begrudge a company the right to decide who represents them as an endorser. Any endorsement contract would always have strict behavior and grounds for termination clauses anyway, so she most likely could have been fired under the terms of a written contract anyway!

It certainly didn't dulled the excitement for the FTOPS X, which concluded on the weekend, with Julian Verse winning over $450,000 in the final tournament. You can still play for $750,000 every Sunday in the big guaranteed tournament at Full Tilt Poker.

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