According to a recent interview with Dan Bilzerian, the deal with GGPoker is off.
In the interview which aired on the Youtube channel No Jumper, the influencer said of the GGPoker contract, "We just agreed to, kind of like, uh, end it... you know."
Bilzerian also more or less confirmed that he never had any real intention of fulfilling his side of the contract with GGPoker. When he was asked why he hadn't done any promo for the company. Bilzerian's response was, "I just... I don’t know. I just couldn’t f*cking post. I couldn’t promote it. It just seemed cheesy."
In previous interviews, Bilzerian has claimed to be a nerd and a professional poker player. In this one, he dismisses the poker community as "f*cking nerds." He then goes on to say he neither associates with nor plays poker with poker players. The whole interview has a strong "they didn't break up with me, I broke up with them" energy.
Money troubles
The information we have is, therefore, fragmentary and filtered largely through the beard that is cut to hide Bilzerian's Prince-Charles chin. Plus it comes in self-contradictory snippets like this:
"The whole premise was that they were gonna put me into high-stakes cash games and I was gonna get the content there. It wasn't supposed to be me sat in front of a laptop. They were also going to give me a bunch of money to play online. That's fine I can get some pictures out of that."
Bilzerian even takes the time to complain that GGPoker wouldn't let him expense his private jet.
It is worth noting that when Bilzerian signed with GGPoker, his company Ignite was in a much worse position than it is now.
He allegedly uses investors' money to fund his lifestyle, so as that money dried up, he may have needed the lifeline from GGPoker. He says in the interview that "he won't sell out." Maybe, but you can certainly hire him by the hour.
How we got here
When GGPoker signed Dan Bilzerian in December 2020 there was an almost immediate backlash. The accusations against Bilzerian for assaulting women and violating their consent were gone over in great detail online. Vanessa Kade suggested on Twitter that a misogynist like Bilzerian might not be an appropriate mascot.
Bilzerian responded with a sexist slur on Twitter. GGPoker responded by killing Kade's affiliate account.
During the backlash, Bilzerian went quiet. His likeness appeared on GGPoker but that was all. He ghosted the in-person commitments he had made and he refused to post on social media.
All of this doesn't seem to have stopped him from clinging to the contract for a year and a half before GGPoker appeared to pull the plug, scrubbing his likeness and name from their website. Then GGPoker issued a brief statement saying Bilzerian was still with them before silence fell again only to be broken by this interview.
Now it seems they really have parted ways. We can only hope that Bilzerian really is done with poker.
Featured image source: Youtube
