Poker Cheating, Angle Shooting, and Incompetence
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Cheating, angle shooting, and incompetence now and forever will be part of poker. (Don’t worry, this article won’t be a total downer. 
) Recently some of my thoughts on the subjects have crystallized thanks to Terrance Chan’s saga at the Playboy Mansion. I don’t intend to “pile on,” but I do have some semi-related things to say, so I’ll outline it.
Here’s the summary:
Terrance Chan (great blog, great player, great guy) played in a $1,500 charity tournament at the Playboy Mansion. Most of the entry fees were donated to charity, but the first few places had prizes. 1st was 2 WSOP seats, 2nd was a golfing package, and 3rd was a TV.
As typical of charity tournamets, it had a wickedly fast structure. Terrance ran good and ended up in the final four players. At that point, weird stuff started happening. First, the tournament director (TD) started jacking the blinds up not every 15 minutes as before, but every hand. Then they declared that they had run out of time and that there would be four more hands, and the prizes would be awarded in terms of the stack sizes at that point (i.e., biggest stack wins 1st prize, next stack wins 2nd, etc.).
At this point, Terrance was 3rd out of 3 players, the other two being Shannon Elizabeth and Steve Dannenmann. Apparently Dannenmann was very drunk, and Annie Duke was sitting behind him, telling him how to play.
With three hands remaining, Terrance was more than three blind steals from 2nd place. That is, if Elizabeth and Dannenmann simply folded all three remaining hands, they would finish 1st and 2nd. Unfortunately for them, Dannenmann was drunk and didn’t pick up on this fact. So both Elizabeth and Duke (who, again, was just sitting behind him coaching him) repeatedly instructed Dannenmann to fold all three hands. He did, the tournament ended, and Terrance finished 3rd.
Naturally, Terrance felt gypped. They changed the rules of the tournament at the last minute, and the rule change prohibited him from winning. Furthermore, Dannenmann was openly receiving coaching both from the other player in the game and from a bystander, which obviously violates the ubiquitous “one player to a hand” rule. And apparently Elizabeth and Dannenmann had agreed to chop up the 1st place prize (1 WSOP seat each).
So Terrance goes home and posts the story on his blog. Simultaneously, he contacts Joy Miller who apparently was organizing the event. He says that he feels cheated, and that he feels he deserves a WSOP seat. She says she’ll ask her higher-ups if they can arrange that.
In the meantime, people reading Terrance’s blog post express outrage that he was treated this way. Obviously, trust is important in gambling, and many people felt this went down in a very shady way (FWIW, I agree with that sentiment).
This online discussion gets back to Joy Miller who then loses her cool entirely and starts verbally assaulting Terrance. She then implies that by posting about the situation on his blog, he has forfeited the prize he won, and that instead he will receive only his $1,500 entry fee. If you read the comments in that post, Miller posts a few times as wsopjoy. If you read those, it will give you more of a feeling for who Terrance is dealing with.
Basically that’s it. You’re all caught up now. Now for my thoughts.
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Tags: angle-shooting, annie-duke, cheating, incompetence, joy-miller, playboy-mansion, poker, shannon-elizabeth, steve-dannenman, terrance-chan, world-series-of-poker, wsop, wsopjoy
I appreciate your thoughts on this Ed. I have never cared much for Annie Duke, but why a person of her experience/stature in the poker world would behave like this is a mystery. Also, why is Steve Dannaman totally drunk and at the final table? Shannon Elizabeth’s celebrity status/preferential treatment is yet another annoying aspect.