Poker News

Last week, one of the biggest news items in the world of sports was the sale of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise. After 29 years at the helm, former United States Senator Herb Kohl relinquished control of the team, selling it to Wall Street financial mavens Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry for $550 million.

For Bucks fans, this is a big deal beyond the dollar figure. For the most of Kohl’s tenure, the Bucks have languished in mediocrity, and that was in some of the team’s better seasons. Many felt new leadership was in order. But more importantly, the new owners promised Kohl that the team would remain in Milwaukee. After years of failure and low attendance, as well as the NBA’s opinion that the Bucks need a new arena, there has been a cloud hanging over the team, the fans, and the city that the Bucks might move. But Kohl is a Wisconsinite through and through and he was determined to make sure the Bucks remained in the state.

The new owners appear committed to Milwaukee and have already pledged $100 million towards a new arena. Perhaps some more of that money will come from online poker players. Marc Lasry, you see, is the Chariman, Chief Executive Officer, and co-founder of Avenue Capital Group, an investment firm that specializes in investing in “distressed and undervalued securities, bank loans and trade claims.” Avenue Capital Group is also part of the partnership, along with Gibraltar-based 888 Holdings, that created the All American Poker Network (AAPN) about a year ago.

AAPN was the first U.S. based, U.S.-facing online poker network, immediately bringing Las Vegas casino Treasure Island onboard. The network actually has yet to launch anything in Nevada, but it is up and running in New Jersey, one of three viable competitors in the state’s online poker market. With a seven-day average of 85 cash game players (figures courtesy PokerScout.com), it ranks third in the Garden State behind the Party Borgata Network (170 players) and WSOP.com (120).

With so much hand-wringing from professional sports leagues in the U.S. over the years about how online gambling can harm the integrity of their games, it may be interesting to some that there has been no mention in any sports media accounts of the sale the relationship Lasry has to online poker. Granted, the All American Poker Network is no PokerStars, but it’s still online gaming.

Lasry’s fondness of poker in general has come up, though. Almost exactly one year ago, the New York Post reported that Lasry turned down a presidential appointment to the post of French ambassador because of his ties to “an alleged mob-run poker ring.”

Last April, we reported on the goings-on of that poker ring, in which 34 people were charged with racketeering, extortion, money laundering and illegal gambling. Poker player Vadim Trincher was named as one of the leaders of the ring, allegedly operating the sports betting portion of the operation. Other poker players who allegedly had much smaller roles were Bill Edler, Peter ‘nordberg’ Feldman, John Hanson, Justin ‘BoostedJ’ Smith and Abe Mosseri.

Lasry denied that reason for his withdrawal from consideration, telling the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “The main reason I pulled out is what I had to give up, I just couldn’t do. The issues in serving in government is that everyone wants you to have absolutely zero conflicts. And at the end of the day at least for me, which meant our firm had invested half of a billion dollars in France and we couldn’t sell that. We have a fiduciary obligation to our investors. At the end of the day, there was nothing we could do.”

The New York Post also reported that Lasry was friends with Illya Trincher, Vadim’s son and one of the people named in the gambling indictment. He did not deny that and essentially admitted to playing in the high stakes poker games, saying, “I love playing poker. I’ve played it since I was in college. I think what ended up happening there, whether you play golf or basketball, you play with people you don’t know, and obviously some of the guys I played with ended up having issues. So I think that was a bit of bad luck obviously on my end that I ended up playing with those guys. It is what it is.”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *