Sometimes people from outside the poker community simply don't understand how this community works. This is especially true if they're part of the YouTube space, where viewers tend to be both very young and very gullible.
An example of this from the past was YouTuber "Catrific", who was accidentally given a ticket to the $1700 Main WSOP Circuit event, rather than the $400 which she registered. She said nothing about it, did well for awhile, and then was caught. Rather than sheepishly accepting the disqualification and quietly slinking away, she had the nerve to complain on Twitter about the floorman being "mean", which of course didn't go well for her.
Now we have another young female YouTuber who has gotten herself in hot water, after being caught in an obvious deception.
"Nemo" is a chess YouTuber from Canada. Her real name is Qiyu Zhou. She has about 90k followers there. Earlier this year, she played a chess match with YouTube megastar "Mr. Beast", but only used pawns because he was a chess novice:
Nemo also is apparently dating "Thallo", whose real name is Alex Epstein. In 2019, Epstein won a bracelet in the tough (but small field) $10k Short Deck event:
Nemo identifies Thallo/Epstein as her "friend and poker coach", but he is actually her boyfriend. Here's his Twitter: https://twitter.com/thallo_poker
Nemo was one of several poker influencers who were given free mega satellite seats on WPT Global's platform. The prize was a $12,400 WPT package, but the influencers had to agree that they would do promotional giveaways for any seats they won. WPT Global is a real money online poker platform which is not legal in the US, but the influencers were able to play because their seats were free (paid for by WPT Global), so there was no actual gambling (risk) involved.
Several influencers won multiple seats, because the fields were small and there were often big overlays, since WPT Global is fairly new. Amanda Botfeld, for example, won 8 seats, and lost heads up for a 9th.
Nemo managed to win one of these $12.4k WPT packages. Initially she tried to ask WPT Global if she could gift it to her boyfriend Thallo, but she was told that she couldn't. There had to be some kind of public-facing contest or promotion for her to hand out the seat, and there had to be some kind of competition for it.
Nemo decided that she would make the contest related to her popular YouTube channel, which has almost 90,000 subscribers. It involved finding a secret phrase embedded in her next YouTube video, and posting the comments.
https://twitter.com/akaNemsko/status/1598054771331473408
In what was a clearly staged exchange, Thallo claimed he was highly eager to find out when the video would be dropping, so he could attempt to win, but Nemo rebuffed his request for info, claiming she was delaying it to be "more fair":
The secret phrase in the video was something like, "My mom is so proud", and then the contestants would have to write something about her mom being proud in a creative fashion. Thallo would make the first 10 correct answers "finalists", and then would pick the most creative or best answer to be the winner of the seat.
Well, a ton of people of course tried to win this. Here was Thallo's entry:
Well, shock upon shocks, guess who the winner was?
https://twitter.com/akaNemsko/status/1598445676958187520
Of course, everyone is outraged about this.
"Cris Thomson" wrote in the YouTube comments:
It's unbelievable how you rigged this giveaway, I did not expect you would ever do this... what was the point of the whole giveaway if the winner was known even before the start? just give it to your bf Thallo and don't try to farm views and comments
Someone named "Hayley" pointed out that Thallo himself admitted to cheating, by posting a junk comment first in order to be in the first 10 commenters, and then editing in the correct phrase later!
https://twitter.com/DColpoys23/status/1598505125429284866
https://twitter.com/big_poser/status/1598528435185500162
https://twitter.com/snapp_andrew/status/1598539732388282368
Clearly she planned to give this seat to Thallo in the first place (who likely either bought it from her or will be giving her a piece of his action), but wanted the excitement, attention, and engagement of a public "contest" on her YouTube channel. Being from the YouTube world, full of gullible 12-year-olds, she probably thought that there wouldn't be much suspicion. She tried to pass off a rigged contest as an exciting giveaway, and now got caught and won't admit what she did.
More baffling is Thallo's involvement in this. The guy is a known high stakes player and presumably has a lot of money, so why he'd throw away his (otherwise good) reputation over something like this is a real head scratcher. How could he have signed off on this boneheaded plan, where it would be obvious to so many that the fix was in?
Even if she and Thallo weren't dating, picking the contest winner to be someone who is her "friend and poker coach" is obviously a terrible look. Thallo should have been disqualified from winning in the first place. Wasn't the point of this contest to give away the seat to a stranger who follows her YouTube channel?
Embarrassing.
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