As Brill was about to be savaged as a monster who’d neglected her dying son, one of poker’s biggest names was busy rallying to her cause. Joey Ingram, a well-known player and host of the Poker Life podcast, had taken a keen interest in the video Brill had assembled of Postle’s questionable hands. He had experience doing quasi-journalistic investigations of poker scandals—in 2018 he accused a Costa Rican poker website of using bots to undermine its human users.
The second season had been filmed prior to the charges against Pokerstars, so this final season was able to run in the months after dismantling of the NAPT. On April 15, 2011, along with similar competitors’ apple en sawgrass sites, Pokerstars.com was seized and shut down by U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which alleged it was in violation of federal bank fraud and money laundering laws.
“Justin insists Stones is 100% secure and there is zero chance of cheating,” Brill texted a friend who asked about the conversation. She added that Kuraitis said that most players simply failed to grasp Postle’s brilliance. Kelly’s co-commentator, 42-year-old Veronica Brill, did not share his sense of awe. She had been observing Postle up close for a while, both as an opponent at the table and a broadcaster, and she’d come to believe there was a nefarious reason for his success. For months she’d resisted mentioning her suspicions on the livestream, hoping that Stones would handle the matter behind the scenes.
At the premiere party for the No Limit Holdem movie, I heard a reporter state that even people in China who never knew what the World Series of Poker was now know about the tournament because of Jennifer Tilly. And here’s a little tidbit some of you might not be aware of, Jennifer Tilly is of Chinese ancestry (on her dad’s side). Hubba hubba, even with a little extra chubba, Jennifer Tilly is one smokin’ fine actress. But forget her Shakespearean stints in the Chucky series for a moment and let’s look at her phenomenal poker career.
That publicity, in turn, would lure more amateur players—the so-called fish who are the lifeblood of poker rooms in California, which earn their money by taking a cut from every game. The Big Game pits an amateur, known as the “loose cannon,” who plays 150 hands of no limit Texas hold ’em poker against five other players, each of whom stake their own money. These five players are mostly professionals, although well-heeled amateurs also play occasionally. The game was advertised to consist of thirty hands per day over the course of five weekdays; however, by observing the players and host’s clothing it is clear that each “week” was shot in a single session over the course of one day. Among many fundraising events, Team Bodog raised over $50,000 for Animal Avengers in a celebrity poker night on October 8, 2005.