Poker giveaway ethics
After an influencer gave a $12k WPT package to her boyfriend, we discuss the do's and don'ts of a poker giveaway on social media.
When I saw the story of Nemo Zhou awarding a $12,000 contest prize to a boyfriend rather than the fans who entered her contest, I remember visibly grimacing. Mostly because it was a completely unethical and shady thing to do, but also because I have worked on hundreds of similar giveaways and I knew the backlash it was going to create.
Zhou had promised a $12,000 WPT package to her fans if they could decode a cryptic message then make their case for why they deserved to win. When the contest was over she awarded the package to her boyfriend, Alex 'Thallo' Epstein, saying he deserved it for all the coaching he gave her.
This was wrong for so many reasons. Epstein clearly will have had inside knowledge about the answer to her cryptic question. While technically he was eligible to participate, he should not have been. He should not have been trying to win it in the first place. It was unfair to all the other participants who were never going to beat him in the 'deserves it most' stakes. It was also particularly bad that Epstein already had at least one WPT package he was trying to sell, making this very much look like a cash grab.
An easy way to get eyes on your product
You see giveaways like this all the time in poker, though not usually for $12,000. We do lots of them here at PokerStrategy.com and I personally have done many more for my books. They are usually a good, quick, reliable way to get attention onto the thing you are promoting by harnessing the enthusiasm of the entrants.
When we do raffles like this at PokerStrategy.com, full time staff are not eligible to play. Some of our coaches are invited to participate in some contests but I certainly could not. I play on Unibet and would love to get some of the tracked benefits our members do on that site, but I do not track any of my poker accounts to PokerStrategy in the 0.01% chance I won a rakerace or freeroll and there were cries of foul play.
This really isn't a poker specific issue, any 'influencer' giveaway has the risk of this happening. Poker has had so many scams in it, stories like these hit harder.
Objective winners = less controversy
You'll never get rid of nepotism in poker or in life. I also think it's fine to award prizes for people who are popular in a community. It's fine when we see somebody like KevMath get awarded with a poker buy-in or two as a thanks for being such an upstanding community member, for example. We also see industry nepotism which is tit for tat. An operator might buy me into their tournament in the hopes I write a favourable article for them, for example.
It's probably best to keep the contests where personal bias can creep in to a minimum anyway. PokerStars have done a good job here with the PSPC. Yes, there are plenty of winners who got their Platinum Pass in a subjective way, but most winners either get their pass by winning a tournament or leaderboard, or from a purely fluke RNG result.
Subjective prize winners are fine in giveaways are when it is clearly defined and transparent. It's when a contest is orchestrated where the entrants clearly had no chance of winning that makes the blood boil.
What is the best way to handle poker raffles? Let us know in the comments:
