I actually think there are three fairly equal possibilities regarding what Mercer's initial motivations were.

Theory #1 is that he's just a cold-hearted scammer (without cancer) who saw an opportunity during the Lafay controversy, and presented himself as the opposite of her, with a semi-long con in mind. In this scenario, he would have been planning the entire way to ask for stakes to the WSOP, after first feigning for a few months that he would refuse anything offered to him.

Theory #2 is that he has a lesser form of cancer, perhaps something in Stage 1, and was initially jealous/annoyed that Jami scored $17k from her Gofundme. In this scenario, his initial motivation would have simply been to bash her out of jealousy, and to greatly embellish his own condition to make his point stronger. Then, after being part of the community for a few months, and becoming envious of all the WSOP updates he kept seeing and hearing about on Twitter, he decided to cash in on his good reputation.

Theory #3 is that he started off as a bored troll (without cancer) who just wanted to inject himself into the Jami controversy. In this scenario, after initially having no plans to ask for anything from anyone, he realized that he actually had built enough of a following/reputation to where he could score a WSOP stake from people. So he went from troll to scammer.



If I had to guess which one was most likely, I'd still say #1.