Surprise, surprise! Among one of the stories that emerged earlier this month — on March 8th, International Women’s Day, to be precise — was that notorious mysogynist Dan Bilzerian had been disappeared from GGPoker’s online site.
Bilzerian’s seeming departure from GGPoker wasn’t really unexpected. He’d been such an utter disgrace as a brand ambassador, literally from his first day under contract (when he called Vanessa Kade a “hoe”), and has long had wide swaths of the poker world expressing disgust. Whatever burst of new signups he’d generate for GGPoker from his huge Instagram following has long since slowed to a relative trickle, and besides, Bilzerian hadn’t been posting on Instagram anyway for the past several months.
Besides, most sites don’t pronounce an ambassador’s exit when it occurs under less than ideal terms. Press statements about departing brand reps are usually reserved for those who have done good work and fulfilled their duties. So there not being a formal announcement about Bilzerian’s seeming exit from GGPoker was, literally, no big deal.
A very delayed clarification
However, two weeks after Bilzerian’s seeming departure, and with the added clarification that there currently seems to be no reference to Bilzerian on GGPoker’s home page, GGPoker Tweeted a very curt reversal of what had been popularly assumed:
Not only did GGPoker choose to wait two weeks to clarify Bilzerian’s status, they chose to disable comments on the post. That’s gone about as well as you’d imagine for any company announcing such a broadly unpopular situation.
So what gives? Why did GGPoker wait two weeks to announce this, and then seemingly be so afraid of hearing the public’s response as turn off comments? And why has Bilz been excised from GGPoker’s home site?
An ironclad contract?
Those are questions where the public is just never going to get square answers, which makes it ripe for conjecture. Were I a betting soul, I’d guess that this is the latest and strongest evidence yet that Bilzerian has an ironclad contact that GGPoker would love to terminate, but cannot.
I’m mindful of Bilzerian’s past, and I’ve never believed his cover story that he won his many tens of millions of dollars playing poker. All of the existing evidence suggests that Dan and his brother, Adam, are the wealthy trust-fund babies of their father, convicted corporate raider Paul Bilzerian. As we’ve touched on in the past, the elder Bilzerian was found guilty on various security-related fraud charges in the late ’80s. He was sentenced to a few years in Club Fed and was fined $62 million by the SEC, though the SEC managed to seize less than $4 million of Bilzerian’s assets. The elder Bilzerian later renounced his American citizenship and lives in the Caribbean to this day.
But, and I note this as nonchalantly as possible, Dan Bilzerian probably has the same edge that his father had, and that’s access to world-class lawyers and accountants. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Bilzerian’s GGPoker deal lacked a clause allowing for “with cause” termination, or any termination clause at all, perhaps.
It might be that GGPoker is saddled with Bilzerian until its terms fully expire, and GGPoker thus feels obligated to clarify Bilz’s status, even if they might not really want to. One writer I know described GGPoker’s tweet about Bilzerian as being “unenthusiastic,” and that’s perhaps a charitable way to put it.
Featured image source: Instagram / Dan Bilzerian