Guy Laliberte Cries Foul After Suffering $26m Full Tilt Losses

Denmark’s Gus Hansen received some rare good news on the poker front recently, after discovering he was not, after all, online poker’s biggest ever loser with $18 million in losses. It would seem that dubious honour now belongs to Cirque du Soleil creator Guy Laliberte, who apparently lost around $26 million on Full Tilt Poker playing $500/$1,000 games between 2008 and 2009.
The 54 year-old billionaire businessman apparently lost the enormous sum gambling under a number of different screen names, including ‘noatima’, ‘patatino’ and ‘LadyMarmalade’. However, in a recent interview with Le Journal de Montréal, Laliberte confesses to feeling like Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption, and in a translation from his own words, not only “got bent over” but “provided the Vaseline himself.”
At the heart of Guy Laliberte’s complaint is the suspicion he was colluded against by so-called friends of his who had access to infinite bankrolls, and subsequently worked together to increase their expected value (EV) against him. As Guy explains:
“I should have remembered that I am a dinosaur on the internet. The story of Full Tilt is clear. I have been totally ripped off. And by people I knew personally. They played with uncovered bank accounts and paid no money.”
During his confession, Laliberte says there would often be two or three of these scam artists playing against him at the table, and he would often find himself squeezed out of pots as the various players would up the ante and go all-in.
“I was an idiot. I was drawn like a school boy,” said the wealthy Canadian.
Nevertheless, Guy Laliberte says he is still an enormous fan of poker and will continue helping to make this year’s WSOP $1 Million The Big One for One Drop even more special then before. Laliberte has also proven his skills on the live circuit many times before, and in 2012 finished the $1 Million buy-in event in 5th place for a $1,834,666 payday. In 2007, he also entered the $25k WPT Star World Poker Classic, where he finished 4th out of 639 players for $696,220.
What Guy Laliberte says he hasn’t done, however, is to bet even a cent of his own money online since Black Friday.