On November 30th, akaNemsko hosted a giveaway for a WPT Package.



After the giveaway on December 1st, she admits to ignoring the giveaway and awarding it to her boyfriend Thallo.



Thallo had already tried, albeit unsuccessfully, selling the seat as early as November 27th!



akaNemsko has since apologized and reran the giveaway fairly, so props to her. Thallo has made a non-apologetic statement.

What evidence does Todd have that other giveaways were rigged/sketchy?

Such an awful take from Todd , obviously a big brand giving away 6-7 figs in overlay tickets for a massive/special event in vegas is great for the community and one can hope they do it again. Just need a bit more control to make sure ambassadors don't get greedy with their own tickets to give away

"Coached me during the tournament as well"

Basically she cheated, the boyfriend who made all decisions during the tourney thought he deserved the seat and she caved to his pressure and then took no responsibiliy.

Another piece of **** in the poker community, what a surprise.

EDIT: she turned around, good on her. Seems the boyfriend is the piece of ****.

It's not an awful take. They should have had some control of the giveaway. It is their brand that is affected in the end. People will look to them to make it right, making it a PR issue that could change the perception of GG but also of online poker.

Idk why some people are giving this girl a pass. Her first response made it pretty clear she doesn't care about making things right. Seems like she only changed her tune once the backlash started building up. Just off eye test some of these satty giveaways seem fishy but I don't care enough to look into anything closely. Todd has a point but is maybe being a bit hyperbolic in his tweet.

how's it a bad look for poker?

I'd say it's about par for the course

Joey talks about it in his latest stream https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1668604...tt_content=vod starting maybe 36 minutes in, and then Thallo came on for a bit (where he did apologize and take responsibility) followed by Todd later in the Stream.

re the coaching during the tournament comment, he wasn't physically in the room with her (or at least he never shows up on camera or is picked up by the mic) and I don't think he was able to see her cards which she kept covered on the stream. I think he was giving her advice after someone would bust out maybe in twitch chat, but I'm not sure about that

Thanks for linking to it

she's pretty

I haven't been paying attention to the WPT global/seat givaways thing at all, but it seems super odd to just hand seats out to influencers and then have them do "giveaways" completely under their control.

They were handing out tickets to satties for the streamers to play on stream, and then if you win you'd have to give away the package to your community

That’s not what happened. They had to earn the packages by winning a tourney. Pretty much if they won they could have a giveaway for their community. It was basically a quasi-meetup game with a bunch of streamers playing at the same time.

is that her claim? we can read the chat logs.

nothing surprises me anymore in this scum world

Timestamped to where Thallo talks about how he helped her on Joey's stream, https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1668604017?t=01h23m14s

Just to stir the pot a bit more, there are accusations she bought her WGM title, paying some high rated hungarian players to throw in a tournament iirc

Yeah, I'll admit I'm a bit confused as to what happened (or allegedly happened). I saw this story pop up over the weekend, but I was busy working so I couldn't give it too much attention.

Here's my understanding of the situation. Please correct me on the parts I have wrong.
1. WPT Global had seat giveaways (similar to the PokerStars Platinum Pass).
2. Zhou won one of these giveaways.
3. She then opted to give it away to one of the first 10 people to respond with a passphrase.
4. Alex Epstein, whether he should have been eligible or not, was one of the first 10 responders.
5. Epstein won the pass.
6. The nature of Epstein's response, plus those of others, seem shady (or rife with hazard of shadiness). One person evidently commented before he/she could have even heard the phrase, while Epstein's response was edited, with no way to know if he truly responded in time.

It's obviously not a good look, so I can understand people losing their **** about it. (I think I already mentioned it in a different thread so I'll spare the story, but my school's men's volleyball club used a similar tactic for prizes, and I think it backfired on them at least once.)

Also, giving this thing to her coach/boyfriend allows her to keep it in the family so to speak – to give it away without truly giving it away. It's why businesses and organizations generally use a "employees are not eligible" for raffles, door prizes, etc. So I do see a motivation on her part to cheat.

Here's the part I don't get right now, so much appreciation to anyone who can help me here:

• What did WPT Global do wrong here? As long as they awarded their prizes fairly, do/should they really care how the recipients use them?

• Ballpark, back-of-a-napkin guesses: how much did Zhou gain from extra views (from people looking for the code phrase) and some extra engagement (from people posting the phrase in the comments)? As of this post, the video in question has 5.9K views and 201 comments. The former number is relatively low for her channel, while the latter is high (with many of the comments being responses to this whole episode). So it's not like she crushed it on the YouTube analytics. This strikes me as a situation where there's a lot to lose in optics, and little to gain in terms of money, but I also have no sense for the CPM on YouTube anymore. So I can't truly comment on the risk-reward part of this.

I dont think there is any ambiguity over whether her “giveaway” was fair or not. Or if it was even ever intended to be fair.

Just depends how WPT worded it when they invited to the creator freeroll…not planning for shenanigans of this sort is naive on WPTs part…I’m assuming she will have a piece of her boyfriends entry (or would have) so it seems she did the rational thing (ignoring the whole ethics thing)

Tallow was in the first 10 to enter.
But he never included the special phrase and that's why he edited his entry once she uploaded phrase.
Thallo also tried to Sell the seat on the 27th, so I don't believe either should be given a pass although she is very attractive. Scum.

Getting coaching during a tourney not only isn't cheating, but rather standard practice. Perhaps you thought she meant coaching during a hand? Because you can get all the coaching you want between hands.

"Coached me that entire tournament" clearly implies he was constantly giving advice. Someone telling you between every hand how the changing ICM environment dictates your range ("Now you have to be extremely nitty, fold even KK", now you have to be extremely aggressive, jam any 2 if it folds to you) is the kind of "coaching" I would expect from cheaters during a satellite. The coach is basically playing for you = cheating.

I’m not sure or anything, but I thought online didn’t even have a ‘one player to a hand’ rule since it’s unenforceable.

Obv still scummy, but I don’t think it matter that he was coaching her mid hand (which he obviously was).

Kinda begs the question why ghosting is illegal, since it’s essentially the same thing.

Bottom line is you gotta assume cheating is rampant online. If you don’t care, or can profit despite that, no worries.