ShareFernando Habegger, aka ‘JNandez87’ to the poker world, has ripped Doug Polk to pieces in a lengthy Twitter breakdown of the Upswing Poker boss’s failed lawsuit against the Swiss PLO expert...
Nandez revealed this week that the court ordered Polk to pay him almost $18,000 in lost earnings, with another $150,000 towards his legal costs.
The background
Their beef goes back to late 2017 when Habegger was brought in as a PLO coach for Polk’s training site, but things didn’t go as planned and he resigned in early 2018.What followed was a very public display of dirty washing, claims and counterclaims over why and how Habegger left, Polk posting on the 2plus2 forum.
“Fernando has decided to exercise his option to leave the PLO lab before the agreed upon term has concluded to offer a competing course. He has been removed from the appropriate Upswing facebook groups, as he plans to steal our customers and use that to begin his own site.”
Incredibly, despite Upswing having lawyers draw up the contract, they had left a clause in the agreement that allowed either party to walk out within 90 days.
Polk said: “We had Fernando sign our contract stating he intended to put 18 months of work out for us. We told our attorney what we wanted, and he for some reason put in a clause that allows either party to cancel after 90 days. I do not know why he did this, and we did not catch that this was part of the contract.”
Despite admitting it was their error, and that Habegger was within his rights to terminate his role with Upswing, Polk and his partners still decided to go ahead with legal action against Habegger.
Here and now...
Last week, Charlie Carrel – another on the long list of Doug Polk’s poker enemies – revealed details of Polk’s smear campaign against Habegger, including the lawsuit...Polk responded to Carrel’s claims with, “Not what happened, happy to bet on it,” but worse was to come, as Habegger released a trove of information on the lawsuit.
One of Polk’s more remarkable claims was that Habegger had stolen the ‘Play and Explain’ poker video format from Upswing.
That will be news to 99% of the poker community, who had been enjoying the same and similar content almost since poker and the internet met some two decades ago.
Polk’s maths was also questioned and found wanting in court, it seems, with moneys owed to Habegger by Upswing substantially higher than Polk’s claims.
Habegger’s tweets about what really happened during his time working with Upswing and the subsequent fallout are numerous, and impossible to show in full here, but they paint a vastly different picture from that offered by Polk in the aftermath of Habegger leaving the site.
Habegger took to Matt Berkey’s Only Friends podcast this week to discuss the entire feud and the fallout from Polk’s very public attack on him...
Doug Polk, usually very quick to respond to social media stories and criticism, has uncharacteristically failed, as yet, to reply to Habegger’s most recent revelations.
