Brandon Cantu Blows up during Dealer’s Choice WSOP Event
11 years ago
20 Jun
Amazon room in Rio, Las Vegas, was a real fighting stage for a brief period of time and soon after the event took place, everybody’s Twitters were buzzing about what went down. According to all the accounts, the main protagonists of the whole story were Brandon Cantu and Jesse Martin.
The whole thing started when Cantu called over a tournament director to make the ruling for the hand he was involved in. Cantu was convinced that he was being angle shot by the other player involved in the hand (Matt), as he saw him checking behind but without verbally announcing it, and when Cantu started to turn ove
So Cantu requested a ruling to be made and as tournament staff was trying to get a real story of what happened, Jesse Martin, who was seated at the nearby table, started saying that there was a zero chance that Matt, who was a regular in mixed-game cash games, was angle shooting. Then he went on to say that Cantu was a known angle-shooter himself and that nobody liked him.
According to Twitter and forum posts of those who were in the room, this pushed Brandon over the edge and he charged at Jesse and, according to later statement by WSOP staff, he pushed him. Soon, couple security guards appeared around the place of incident and Cantu was given a two-round penalty and had to apologize to Jesse before he was allowed back into the tournament.
I live by the code that if you are one of my best friends and also happen to be one of the top 1 percent of honorable people in the world (the guy honestly has as squeaky clean of am image and reputation as you could imagine) then I am gonna come to your defense regardless if it's my place or not when I see someone like Cantu not only attacking you but winning the argument based on how loud he is yelling and how well known he is.Jessie Martin (HiatusOver on 2+2);Both Cantu and Martin later gave interviews about the situation and Jesse also wrote a post on 2+2 explaining why he got involved although he wasn’t even seated at the same table. Apparently, Matt is a good friend of his, whom he had known for years and a guy for whose integrity he would vouch 100% and since he wasn’t all that well versed with tournament environment, Jesse felt like he should say something in his defense.
Brandon Cantu, on the other hand, explained that he was aggravated by Martin’s statement as he only shot angle once in his life, and that was five years ago. He believes Jesse had it coming for calling him angle-shooter without any real evidence to substantiate his claim, as no one has ever seen him actually trying to angle-shoot.
While the reasons for the conflict are on one side of this story, there has also been a lot of debate about WSOP staff’s reaction to the incident, as many believe that the penalty for physically engaging someone in the poker room should be ban, not just couple rounds away from the tables. Some have also put this in context of Cantu’s earlier altercation with Jeff Lisandro which did not involve any physical contact, but there was a lot of shouting and screaming.
Poker has always been a type of environment that can push some people over the edge quite easily, but it is up to casinos to determine where the line is and what behavior can and what cannot be tolerated under any circumstances, and while Jesse Martin possibly didn’t have business getting involved in a discussion that did not directly affect him, Brandon Cantu may have dodged a bullet on this one all the same.
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