Poker Pro Lee Childs Wins Backer Lawsuit

Poker pro Lee Childs, who made the WSOP final table in 2007, had a court in New Jersey rule in his favor last month, over a lawsuit pertaining to his former backing arrangement.

According to Childs’ lawyer, David Zeitlin, the poker pro was served with a civil summons and complaint back in 2012 when Childs’ then backer, Lynne Mitchnick, terminated their deal and wanted the approximately $40,000 in make-up Childs had accrued playing poker tournaments.

“I found the lawsuit distasteful in that, in my opinion, it violated an unstated rule that gambling disputes be handled in house, within the gambling world,” Zeitlin wrote. “Something about an investor requesting that someone gamble with her funds, then asking the gambler to refund her losses just did not sit well with me. In terms of pure legal viability, I believed the suit to be ambitious at best. In short, the case sounded like a bunch of B.S.”

The court did hear that Childs failed “to perform some of the administrative tasks” and allegedly didn’t always “play to the best of his ability," (one time having two beers at a final table) but it was determined that none of that resulted in a material loss for Mitchnick.

Childs’ lawyer wrote about Mitchnick’s possible motive:

“While the Plaintiff claimed she was aggrieved by Lee’s alleged failings, it could certainly be inferred that the Plaintiff had some other objective, as her dissatisfaction tended to correlate with Lee’s downswings…she decided to terminate the agreement in February of 2012, but waited until just after the potentially lucrative 2012 WSOP to pull the trigger. I suspected that the Plaintiff wanted out of the relationship, but was using the contract to extract an exit payment to boot.”

Childs has more than $2 million in lifetime tournament scores.

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