Full Tilt Poker Pro Andrew Feldman Loses £140,000 Gamble With A Rabbi

More used to the high stakes poker tables than the stock market, poker pro Andrew Feldman has just learnt the perils of risky investments after trusting a 34-year old rabbi with his hard earned poker winnings.
Apparently, Andrew Feldman (22) was persuaded to allow rabbi Nissim to place spread bets on the Dow Jones for him with the expectation that his ‘friend’ would make him a tidy profit. Instead, however, the Full Tilt pro ended up with a bill for £140,000 after the rabbi got a bit carried away during a two week period in October 2008.
Now the pair have fallen out over the business deal gone sour and Feldman is refusing the pay the money, claiming that although he agreed to indemnify Mr Nissim for any losses, he hadn’t agreed to the volume of bets placed by the rabbi. Feldman is claiming he sanctioned around five bets a session but instead at one stage rabbi Nissim had placed as much as 77 bets in a four-hour period.
Representing Mr Nissim, lawyer Richard Ritchie said that Feldman had allegedly lost up to £700,000 playing poker and was looking to recoup his losses in a hurry when the deal was struck. Despite claiming his client had informed Feldman of the losses after each session, he was instructed to carry on regardless. As Richard Ritchie explains:
“This was obviously because this was not his money that was at risk. Now that the account has come to an end and it is time to pay up, Mr Feldman is refusing to do so on the basis that Mr Nissim has somehow cheated him. That is absurd. Why would he wish to cheat Mr Feldman?”
As the court case continues, Feldman may be reflecting back on another time when chasing loses and taking a gamble landed him in hot water.
When he was 18 years-old, Feldman had managed to turn a few hundred pounds into a $100,000 bankroll playing online poker over a year and a half period. However, it took just one day for the pro to blow the lot.
“One night, I was coming home from the casino where’d I’d lost quite a bit of money, £2000 on 3-card poker, so I was a bit steamed up. I thought yeah, whatever, I’ll go and get it back from poker. So I played out of my bankroll at $25/$50. It took just one bad beat and then I started playing bad and by the end of the night I’d done half the roll. I went to bed, woke up, was in a bit of shock after only seeing half my balance there, and within the next few hours all that had been wiped out.”
Maybe after this latest controversy, Feldman has finally learnt that poor bankroll management and chasing losses belongs squarely in the realm of the loser.