Matt Stout’s Poker Clash With ‘Fearless’ Viral Video Doc

(Photo: Stoutpoker.com)

“It definitely hits home a lot more when a guy you’ve met, a guy you’ve interacted with, chatted with, is the one who’s getting his face smashed or dragged off the flight for no reason,” says poker pro Matt Stout of this week’s United Airlines controversy - which is exactly what the world saw happen to poker amateur Dr David Dao in a viral video of the incident.

The New Jersey pro who boasts $3.5million in tournament winnings to his name describes how he once faced Dao in a $5k buy-in tournament, saying that although the 1st prize was over S150K: 

“He was just going nuts: didn’t care about the money, didn’t care about anything. We all thought, who is this guy?”

A distraught Dr Dao was filmed by fellow passengers being dragged kicking and screaming by airline security after refusing to leave the over-booked flight, but Stout says at the table “he was fearless.”

“He played a pretty crazy, unorthodox style… but it made more sense when I realized he was a doctor and inexperienced, but I was just so impressed by how fearless he was. When we get down to the final table I do research on all my opponent’s and I just couldn’t wait to find out more about this guy – he was really like the wild-card of that tournament!” says Stout. “Everyone was wondering what he was going to do… really unpredictable, super-aggressive… made some wild plays… he even made a big play against me and got away with it.”

As I reported yesterday, Dr David Dao has tournament winnings of over $260,000 including a 2nd place worth $117,244 in a 2009 WSOP Circuit event – although his shady past and criminal record have also been at the centre of attention following his brutal eviction from the Kentucky-bound flight out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Despite some confusion over which Dr David Dao was on the airline and which one racked up the criminal record, it appears that our poker-playing doc is one and the same, found guilty back in 2003 of “complicity in obtaining a controlled substance (hydrocodone) by fraud” and given a suspended sentence of two year and eight months in prison and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine.