Accused Poker Cheat Mike Postle Lacks Representation For Lawsuit Says Plaintiff's LawyerAttorney Mac VerStandig Told Podcast That Postle Was Possibly Evading Attempts To Serve Legal Notice |
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Mike Postle, the poker player who is accused of cheating a live-streamed low-stakes poker game out of approximately $250,000, lacks legal representation and is allegedly trying to delay having his day in court.
Mac VerStandig, the attorney heading the $33 million lawsuit against Postle, went on The Rake podcast in January and told hosts Jamie Kerstetter and Marle Cordeiro that he was having trouble getting Postle to accept legal service. Accepting legal service would start the legal process and force Postle to show up in court in the near future to plead his case in front of a jury.
In 2018 and 2019, Postle had gone on a roughly quarter-million-dollar winning streak in mostly $1-$3 no-limit hold’em live-streamed cash games at Stones Gambling Hall near Sacramento, California. Following more than a year without more than a couple losing sessions and several head-scratching plays with an unreasonably high success rate, former Stones Live Commentator Veronia Brill made her cheating concerns public.
When she tweeted her initial allegations last September, she released a YouTube compilation of hands that showcased Postle’s erratic play and absurdly high win-rate. While it is still unclear how Postle cheated, many notable poker pros agreed that foul play was afoot and VerStandig’s law firm filed a lawsuit the following month.
VerStandig had originally given the summons and complaint to a local process server, as is the standard in most cases. The server tracked down Postle’s address and went to his house several times to serve Postle but told VerStandig that each time he went to the address, nobody was home.
“There was part of me that just thought that this was perhaps suspicious,” VerStandig told The Rake. “Not that I doubted my process server, but perhaps that my process server thought that this was more of a mundane everyday case than it is.”
Since the start of the lawsuit, which was filed last October, VerStandig made semi-regular trips to Sacramento to see his clients and stay abreast of any new details. During one of his visits since his server failed multiple times to serve Postle, he decided that he would take matters into his own hands.
“There is no prohibition on an attorney serving process and for the second time in my legal career, I went out and did it myself,” said VerStandig about serving a defendant their papers. “I went to the house, saw a car in the driveway, I knocked on the door, rang the doorbell… pretty obnoxiously too.”
VerStandig said that he was in front of the house for eight minutes while he knocked on the door and rang the doorbell. After hearing noise coming from inside the house, VerStandig assumed somebody was home and went back to his car, parked across the street, to get a better view of the situation.
“You get a different angle the further away you go,” said VerStandig. “From the car, you can see the upstairs of the house. The upstairs of the house is illuminated and if you’re sitting in a dark area and seeing into an illuminated area, you can see what is going on.”
That’s when VerStandig believes he saw Postle inside the house, intentionally ignoring the knocks on the door.
“I saw someone moving upstairs,” he said. “It looked to be a male and it looked to be someone that fit the description of Mike Postle. So, I went back and did a melodic riff on the doorbell.”
VerStandig noted that there is nothing illegal about evading service and that Postle’s alleged actions would have no bearing on the case in the long run.
He did say, however, that there is legal precedent in place that states if the server, or in this case the lawyer himself, knows that the defendant is on the other side of a window, announcing your presence and leaving it on the doorstep would suffice as service.
That is precisely what VerStandig did. He went back to the house, knocked on the door, rang the bell, announced his presence and left the documents on his doorstep. He immediately filed an affidavit of service with the court. If the courts agree that Postle has been served notice, the ball will get rolling and a court date will be finalized.
“As long as he either shows up in court or we use this to get a default against him, that’s fine,” said VerStandig.
According to a Fresno Bee article from last October, Postle was being represented by William Portanova, a well-known criminal defense attorney in the area.
Originally, VerStandig reached out to Portanova in hopes of having Postle’s attorney accept service on his behalf. Portanova, however, set the record straight and said that he was only representing the accused cheater for any criminal proceedings. The lawsuit at hand is currently a civil matter.
VerStandig said that Portanova eventually started ignoring his attempts to contact him, which was when he hired a server. Although the process was delayed longer than he would’ve liked, there were some positives from it.
“It’s been nice having some time, behind the scenes, to do our I’s, cross our T’s, make sure we have a good grasp of everything that is going on,” said VerStandig. “And get to know our now 88 clients on some level.”
After discussing the situation with Portanova, VerStandig concluded that Postle did not have any representation of the pending lawsuit.
“Now that he has been served, he is on the clock,” said VerStandig. “So, we will find this out in the next month or two.”
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