I’ve been around the poker world for quite a while and have been witness to all forms of “life-tilt” in that time: I’ve seen tables flipped over; players punched; and on one occasion a player walk around the table, pull over the chair of another player, and proceed to stomp his head. All that said, I’ve never seen the kind of tilt that caused 35 year-old Michael Gallagher to run afoul of the law in the UK.
According to the website onlinepoker.net, Gallagher lost approximately $30k at an unnamed online poker room over the course of the past year, and after apparently reaching his breaking point sent a very threatening E-Mail to the company declaring he would “pay a visit to the office with a sawn-off shotgun and shoot as many people as he could, unless the company payed (sp.) him £30,000 ($50,000) to clear his losses.”
Gallagher sent a follow-up E-Mail the next day saying his previous message was sent while he was in a drunken state and apologized for his behavior. But the unnamed website felt it was a serious enough threat to call in the authorities, who charged Gallagher with blackmail! Gallagher would later plead to the far lesser offense of electronic communication conveying a threat.
This story should give other players two very important life-lessons:
#1 – Never gamble with money you can’t afford to lose
#2 – Regardless of how much you’ve had to drink, always, ALWAYS, wait a day or two before sending an inflammatory E-Mail.

Tags: Authorities, Blackmail, Breaking Point, Drunken State, E Mail, Electronic Communication, Losses, Lost, Michael Gallagher, Money, Occasion, Online Poker, Poker Player, Poker Room, Poker World, Sawn Off Shotgun, Tilt, Witness

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 10:23 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.