Which would honestly make a lot more sense than HCL paying him.

PM me, I'll lowball and do it for 80k

it was a lot less than that. 1700 sticks out in my mind for some reason. But that was also in the days of huge online sponsorships.

I'll see if I can locate it, but I have a similar recollection of Gavin Smith saying Full Tilt paid for a chunk of the $20K buy-in on Poker After Dark (at least, the episodes on which they played a six-player SNG). If so, then $1700 could easily be in the ballpark: a fraction of a $20K buy-in, five 42-minute episodes, and boom.

As for the Nik Airball thing... what was his actual comment about getting $100K per episode? I'm wondering how much of the reaction – e.g. the article above – comes from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone. He makes an offhand crack on stream, someone hears it and Tweets about it, then a few iterations later, the legend (or in this case, misunderstanding) becomes fact in the minds of certain people.

Either way, Borg23 has it right: no matter how he said it, the dollar figure itself should be the first clue that Nik was clearly joking around.

You know how Gabe Kaplan frequently jokes that his copy of Super System cost him a million dollars (the figure probably changes every time)? I'll be the HighStakesDB author heard that crack, and now thinks Doyle charged Gabe six figures for the book.

Airball said it to the table in one of the PLO streams

The table was like "yeah, cool story bro"

Yeah, I also remember this similarly, thought it was stated by someone that GSN payed something like $1000-1500/hr for HSP appearance.

Edit: Yep, $1250/hr according to this post from DNegs from January 2006. So that would be the figure for season 1 I guess. Maybe it got higher later on, who knows.

https://fullcontactpoker.com/poker-f...-on-gsn-compd/

Nick Vertucci："Hahahhahaha. Gotta love it, Nik!! Yes, we compensate him $100k per episode, and he features in 8 episodes monthly. The total of $800k is entirely justified. How else do you suppose one could consistently appear each week, even amidst losses, and manage the costs?"

How could anyone think Nick is serious, what do you think the "hahahahahaha" mean?

Yeah, and no one ever lies at the poker table..