We have seen plenty of examples over the last several years how the many of the stars of the poker boom of the mid-to-late “aughts” have had trouble dealing with the collapse of online and televised poker in the United States and, in turn, their stardom. Add to that list one Ted Forrest, who, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal report, had a warrant issued for his arrest on Friday. The two charges: theft and drawing and passing bad checks with the intent to defraud.
The LVRJ reports the criminal complaint states that between October 28th, 2012 and May 17th, 2013, Forrest tried to pass two bad checks totaling $215,000 at the Wynn Las Vegas.
He signed a “confession of judgment” in Clark County District Court in 2013 in which he agreed that he owed the Wynn $270,000 and submitted to a payment plan of $10,000 per month for ten months plus a $170,000 lump sum. A confession of judgment is essentially what it sounds like: a signed document in which the defendant accepts responsibility for certain damages. It is a way to get right to the point of a case without dealing with lengthy and expensive court proceedings.
Forrest apparently never made good on the payment plan, but for some reason, the case ended up closed.
He also ran into problems with the Mirage in September 2015, according to the LVRJ, when the casino filed a lawsuit claiming that owed them about 40 percent of a $100,000 loan. Whether or not he even paid the casino back all that he owed is unclear, even though a judge ruled for the Mirage.
Forrest’s attorney, Chris Rasmussen, pretty much thinks it’s all bullshit, saying specifically of the Wynn issue that the casino extended Forrest a casino marker (a cash advance/IOU).
“We believe this is a long-standing civil dispute,” Rasmussen told Review-Journal. “And now that he’s in a dispute with them, they’ve moved to prosecute.”
Ted Forrest, as mentioned, was one of the first batch of poker celebrities to come about as the result of the poker boom that started with Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, growing simultaneously with the explosion of online poker, and stretching until arguably Black Friday in April 2011. Forrest has over $6.3 million in live poker tournament earnings in his career, though the bulk of that was pre-Black Friday. Since 2011, he has just one six-figure cash, though that was a nice one, a gold bracelet victory in $1,500 Razz at the 2014 WSOP.
Forrest is perhaps even better known in the poker community for being willing to accept the wildest of prop bets. He made headlines in 2010 for a weight-loss bet he made with Mike Matusow in which Forrest, not a particularly large man to start with, had to lose about 50 pounds (Forrest said he weight 188 in clothes and the bet was to get under 140). Forrest put up $100,000 to Matusow’s $1 million that he could shed the weight by September 24th of that year and another $50,000 against $1 million that he could do it by July 15th (I honestly am not sure of the start date).
In September 2014, Forrest made it publicly known that Matusow did not pay up, forking over only $70,500 in the four years since the bet was completed.