Jamie Gold won $12 million in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas last month. A lawsuit says he’s entitled to only half of the winnings.
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<NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">By MIREYA NAVARRO
</NYT_BYLINE>Published: September 10, 2006
LOS ANGELES
Jamie shows the cards that
won the championship
Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times
JAMIE GOLD should have returned to Hollywood basking in his cool celebrity.
A former talent agent and manager with a respectable list of clients to his credit, he had just embarked on a career as a television producer and was about to start casting for a reality show called “Hottest Mom in America.”
Then four weeks ago, he scored a victory that took him from behind the scenes to center stage: he beat more than 8,700 competitors in Las Vegas to win $12 million in the hottest gambling extravaganza in the country, the World Series of Poker.
But Mr. Gold, 37, did not come home strutting. In fact, he hasn’t come home at all, but has been lying low while struggling with a jackpot-size dose of scandal and the security worries that accompany such a windfall.
It all started in the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, when he took the chip lead on Day 3 of the main event in the poker World Series. Mr. Gold said he was told there had been threats made against him, though neither he nor tournament officials were able to provide much detail.
“People wanted to hurt me or put something in my food because I seemed to be the only thing in the way of other people winning,” he said.
Mr. Gold asked his sponsor, Bodog.com, a Costa Rican-based online gambling company that paid his $10,000 entry fee, to provide security, which it did, in the form of two burly 24-hour bodyguards.
And that was just the beginning of his headaches.
A British television producer, Crispin Leyser, who lives in Los Angeles and trains poker players with his wife, has filed a lawsuit claiming Mr. Gold reneged on a deal to split his winnings, leading a judge in Las Vegas temporarily to freeze half of his $12 million purse.
Then, Mr. Gold’s instant stardom made him a target of gossip blogs, where anonymous postings accused him of exaggerating his Hollywood credentials, much to his chagrin. “Why would I make up my previous life?” he fumed in a recent interview.
UPON his return to Los Angeles, Mr. Gold felt it necessary to hop from hotel to hotel under assumed names, tailed by security guards, still concerned about the murky threats. He hasn’t gone back to his Malibu home (he’s currently visiting his parents in Paramus, N.J.) because neighbors and friends alerted him to “shady characters” lurking around. Paparazzi, perhaps, but Mr. Gold isn’t taking chances.
Mr. Gold, who brought to No-Limit Texas Hold’em his aggressive, talkative style — and his befitting name — chalked it up to his new status as a poker celebrity, which is bound to grow as ESPN broadcasts replays of the tournament through Sept. 26.
“It’s sad what’s happened around me, but I still look at this as a huge accomplishment,” he said last month from his suite at the Raffles L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills, one of his temporary luxury homes. But even in the world of bluffs, high stakes and stare-downs — poker, not Hollywood — Mr. Gold’s travails, and some of his behavior, have left many scratching their heads.
“People were perplexed, and that is still the reaction with the lawsuit and all the other things,” said Gary Thompson, the spokesman for the 37-year-old World Series of Poker, a property of Harrah’s Entertainment.
The security detail, for one thing, certainly raised eyebrows.
Poker players under guard are unusual. “It’s not rock-star land,” said Phil Gordon, a pro player and television analyst who did commentary for ESPN during the World Series. “We don’t travel with our posses.”
After Mr. Gold crushed the competition in the World Series’ main event, he did something even more out of character for a poker winner: he left the money at the cage. World Series officials said that among 873 players who shared in the $82.5 million overall prize, Mr. Gold was the only one to walk away without his money. Mr. Gold, who is single, said he was waiting on tax advisers to recommend the best way to handle the money, the bulk of which he says will go to the care of his father, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
As late as last week, he was cagey about revealing that he later collected the money, claiming in an interview he had not touched it, though officials at the Rio hotel said he had been wired the uncontested amount of $5,945,000 on Aug. 24.
(Mr. Gold later explained that it has been put in a trust while he deals with the tax issues.)
While marching to his own drummer, Mr. Gold easily fits in today’s poker scene, say some who follow the game. Amateurs now vastly outnumber the pros at tournaments, said Matthew Parvis, managing editor of the poker magazine Bluff, and the new breed of poker player tends to be young, brash and ego-driven.
Mr. Gold, who grew up in New York and New Jersey, said he played cards all his life. His grandfather was a gin rummy champion, but he didn’t think of becoming a serious player until seeing the 1998 movie “Rounders,” in which Matt Damon plays a reformed gambler who returns to high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off a debt.
Up to then, Mr. Gold had worked as a talent agent and manager. In the early 1990’s, he counted James Gandolfini and Jimmy Fallon among his clients, and at one point led his own talent management firms. A year ago he folded his latest firm into Buzznation, a television production company of branded entertainment, and is about to start auditions for “Hottest Mom in America,” a yet-to-be-sold reality show.
Over the last two and a half years, Mr. Gold said, he honed his poker skills at card clubs around Los Angeles, at Las Vegas hotels and in tournaments. He started devoting 30 hours a week to playing and had backers with whom he would split winnings. And he befriended Johnny Chan, who won two World Series tournaments back to back in the late 1980’s and became a mentor.
“He’s an extremely smart person,” said Mr. Chan, 49, who coached Mr. Gold in the latest World Series. “He plays more hands than normal people. He knows his opponents.”
For the World Series of Poker’s main event, Mr. Gold gobbled bowls of blueberries, which he calls his brain food, and took the chip lead early. He held on to it, sitting down at the final table with more than $26 million in chips.
“That’s a testament to his big-stack strategy,” Mr. Gordon, the pro player, said. “Jamie was very proficient on pressuring his opponents to make life-or-death decisions.”
Mr. Gold, who calls himself “an action player,” attributed his victory to the best poker he had ever played, and luck. “I was in this unbelievable zone.”
About 30 friends and family members, including his mother, Jane, 63, watched him win. From the table, Mr. Gold, an only child, made a tearful call to his immobilized father, Robert Gold, 70, a retired dentist.
But soon joy turned into mortification. After spending three days relaxing, Mr. Gold decided to forgo heading home after hearing the reports of strangers in his neighborhood.
Then some newspapers and cable shows picked up the Internet gossip accusing him of padding his résumé. He may have embellished some — for example, he lists as former clients Lucy Liu and Kristin Davis, but the women’s representatives said he was not their point agent even if he worked for their agency. But former colleagues vouch for him.
“He had a great eye for talent and he was really aggressive about developing talent,” said Mark Armstrong of Sanders Armstrong Management, who said he had worked with Mr. Gold when he represented artists like Brandy, Mr. Fallon and Mr. Gandolfini. (Mr. Armstrong now represents Mr. Gandolfini.)
The far more serious allegations, though, came in the lawsuit filed by Mr. Leyser. In his suit, he claims to have met Mr. Gold in Las Vegas in July and that Mr. Gold told him Bodog would give him a seat in the World Series main event if he secured some celebrities to wear Bodog clothing at the tournament. (Mr. Gold wore the logo for Bodog.net, Bodog’s instructional site.)
The suit said the two then agreed that Mr. Leyser would bring in the celebrities — he produced Matthew Lillard, who played Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo movies, and Dax Shepard, a comedian who appeared on MTV’s Punk’d — and that Mr. Gold and Mr. Leyser would split any winnings equally. In a statement, Bodog.com said Mr. Gold was helpful in bringing along poker-playing celebrities and that the company was unaware of any side deal he may have made in obtaining them.
ON Aug. 10, the day Mr. Gold made it to the final table, the suit alleges, Mr. Gold left a telephone message for Mr. Leyser promising “there’s no way anybody will go anywhere with your money.”
Mr. Gold, who has acknowledged that he and Mr. Leyser had been in “discussions” to resolve the dispute before the suit was filed, referred questions about it to his lawyer, Patrick Byrne. Mr. Byrne said he planned to file an answer denying “a majority of the allegations.”
“We don’t believe Mr. Leyser is entitled to any money as a matter of law,” he said.
But if Mr. Leyser prevails, Mr. Gold would be shunned by other players, the poker cognoscenti said. Deals are common among players, many of whom swap percentages of their winnings to guarantee equity even during a losing streak, and verbal agreements are considered ironclad. “It’d be unprecedented not to pay,” Mr. Gordon said of such deals.
Mr. Gold is working on his television show and plans to attend Mr. Chan’s celebrity poker tournament in the Turks and Caicos this week. Under a two-year endorsement deal with Bodog.com, he’ll participate in tournaments, make promotional appearances and work on a $1 million television production deal.
Mr. Gold, who stands to make even more money in endorsements, says he wants to share his good fortune with friends. But his focus, he said, remains in ensuring that his parents are well taken care of and starting a foundation for research on Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“At the end of this I won’t have much more money than when I started,” he said. “I may buy a car or something.”
Of course, he may be bluffing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/fashion/10poker.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
