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Rick Salomon won’t be receiving $2.8M unpaid winnings

Runner-up of the Fall Madness High Roller back in 2018 in Las Vegas, Rick Salomon is a pro poker player also known for twice marrying Hollywood actress and Baywatch star, Pamela Anderson. He took a seat in 2014 at the Tiara Miramar Beach hotel near Cannes in France where he claimed that a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families, Raad al-Khereiji gravely lost a poker tournament.

It was a NLHE game that persisted for 48-hours, and the American player sued the Saudi sheikh for unpaid winnings of a whopping $2.8 million which he owed to Salomon by the end of the marathon. He claimed that that Khereiji’s lawyer would be in touch to clear out the debt and the two eventually parted ways. A few months later, a lawyer for the sheikh notified Salomon that he will not find any sort of payment coming his way.

In a trial in October, the judges heard the French lawyer, Ronald Sokol representing Salomon’s case emphasized that his client has been striving to recover the unpaid amount in the last 5 years but has been unsuccessful ever since. As for Khereiji, the poker game had been friendly with no financial stake. To prove his stance, the 51-year-old’s lawyer further added that the sheikh’s gambling records reveal a loss of roughly $34 million over just 29 months while playing poker in the Ivey Room in Aria.

It would be surprising for anyone who has ever taken to the poker table that the case hinged back to an 1804 French Law. According to it, the court can only enforce gaming debts that involve weapons, horse or foot racing, tennis or chariot races and other sorts of games that do involve physical skill and exercise. Khereiji’s lawyer argued that poker is a game of chance, not physical skill and movement. And Sokol asserted that the game lasted an ‘energy-consuming’ 48 hours.

The sheikh’s lawyer Paul-Albert Iweins stated, “The only explanation is that his request was contrary to law. There was an infinitely small chance of winning because, even supposing there was such a debt, which my client totally contests, you cannot pursue someone in France for a gambling debt, full stop.”

The high-stakes poker player, Salomon is now considering taking the case to the French Supreme Court as there has been no case law since 1804 in the civil courts. For latest updates on poker industry and tournaments around the world, keep reading GutshotMagazine.com and stay tuned!

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