Yeah I haven't even noticed them this year. Did they do a giveaway via influencers at all this year? I haven't seen any, whereas in November 2022, you couldn't miss these WPT giveaways when reading poker social media.Originally Posted by hesterandeldridge
I agree that a lot of these giveaways last year were fairly shady, and riddled with favoritism or outright rigging. In most cases, though, it wasn't provable or blatant enough to really make public allegations. I had a lot of people coming to me, asking me to publicly bash X or Y social media personality for "rigging" their giveaways, but the strong evidence just wasn't quite there. I agreed with these allegations in many cases, but it just wasn't enough for me to accuse people, so I didn't.
The Nemo/Thallo one was the only giveaway which had such an obvious rigging element that it drew the most attention. The initially flippant attitude by both Thallo and Nemo also poured much more fuel on that otherwise small fire.
As I said on radio, WPT Global made a mistake by not giving stricter guidelines on how these could be given away. Had they done so, the various rigging controversies (of which this one was biggest) would have been virtually nonexistent.
Thallo claims that Nemo won this seat in a cash satellite, and didn't get it for free like the others. If that's true, I agree with them that Nemo should have been allowed to transfer it to Thallo without any contest nonsense. Still, even if unfairly commanded to hold a contest if she wanted to give it away, Nemo/Thallo badly mishandled it from that point.
I do wonder how much WSOP paid her to be a sponsored player for their Atlantis tournament. You raise a good point that it may not have been worth the renewed backlash if she wasn't getting paid much.
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