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ACR Sponsors Heads-Up Match Abandoned by GGPoker

Written by Jennifer Newell
Last updated on
Jennifer Newell

The tournament will finally happen…on Americas Cardroom…for charity.

GGPoker had promised a heads-up tournament for the winner of an online tournament in December 2020. That tournament had been a $100K freeroll to celebrate the birthday of GGPoker’s newest sponsored pro, Dan Bilzerian. Alex O’Brien won that freeroll for $10K and was supposed to play Bilzerian in a heads-up match online for an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas. The problem was that O’Brien was a woman, and the famously misogynistic Bilzerian couldn’t be bothered to play the match.

One year later, Americas Cardroom stepped in to offer to host the tournament on its site. ACR offered to organize the heads-up game for O’Brien to play any ACR pro and donate $10K to the charity of the winner’s choice.

O’Brien agreed, and she chose ACR Pro Vanessa Kade as her opponent.

There was some planning to agree on a date. And a little more than a month later, it’s set. The two women will play heads-up on ACR, livestreamed on Twitch, on Saturday, January 29.

Unfulfilled GGPoker Promotion

GGPoker took a risk when signing Bilzerian as a sponsored poker pro. Not only did he not play much poker and he lived in a country in which he couldn’t play on GGPoker, he was an offensively misogynistic person famous only for his distain for women and love for money and guns.

Not surprisingly, I had a few thoughts on that signing at the time.

Meanwhile, GGPoker celebrated its new pro with a freeroll for Bilzerian’s upcoming birthday. GGPoker put up $100K for the “Birthday Freeroll” that played on December 7, 2020. The winner would not only walk away with $10K but also the opportunity to play a “once-in-a-lifetime” heads-up match against Bilzerian, which would award the winner an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas to party with Bilzerian.

GGPoker thought that a young male would win the tournament. Then, Bilzerian would fly him to Vegas and smother him with scantily-clad women and weed. When a woman won the tournament, that promotion fell faster than a naked woman being thrown off Bilzerian’s roof.

Reportedly, GGPoker had offered to put O’Brien into the WSOP Online Heads-Up tournament on its site in 2021, to which she agreed. However, she noted that playing in that stacked field wasn’t the game for which she prepared and which GGPoker promised. The gesture failed to placate O’Brien.

ACR Makes an Offer

The abandoned GGPoker promotion created an opportunity for another poker site to swoop in and offer to take over. It worked. Americas Cardroom did just that. And the irony of ACR – who signed Vanessa Kade as an ACR pro after she spoke out against the Bilzerian signing, received hate from Bilzerian’s fanboys, and lost her GG affiliate deal because of it – taking over the promotion isn’t lost on many people.

One year after O’Brien won the GGPoker freeroll, she tweeted a snarky reminder of the Bilzerian birthday and GGPoker’s abandoned promotion.

O’Brien called that bet and chose none other than Kade as her opponent. Kade gladly accepted.

Almost immediately, offers rolled in for coaching. Rob Kuhn, founder of Elite Poker Coaching, offered a few hours of preparation for the heads-up game. But O’Brien had been coached for months after her initial GGPoker freeroll win. She worked with longtime poker pro and heads-up specialist Olivier Busquet. She received advice from Jennifer Shahade, Jamie Kerstetter, David Lappin, Kara Scott, and Fedor Holz, the latter of whom offered free coaching on his Pokercode website. O’Brien wrote about her experiences and preparation for the BBC.

Back to O’Brien’s reminder tweet one year after her $10K win, GGPoker did reach out to O’Brien to vow to donate something to charity in lieu of the failed heads-up game. “Turning this into a massive positive for so many people in need is way better than winning against @DanBilzerian,” she wrote on Twitter. “I couldn’t be happier!”

Meanwhile, she had that other $10K offer for charity from ACR. That one was closer to the original promise of a heads-up match. It just came from a different online poker operator.

The game is now set. O’Brien and Kade will play heads-up online for $10K to be donated to a charity of choice. Americas Cardroom will livestream the match on its Twitch channel, starting at 4pm ET on Saturday, January 29.

Women Supporting Women

ACR players know that the Venom tournament begins today, January 21. It is the first of four starting flights this weekend and next weekend for the $10M Venom. The buy-in is $2,650, but the prize pool is promised to be at least $10M.

Of course, Venom Fever is happening with numerous satellites and other promotions offer many ways to win seats to the Venom at a fraction of the actual buy-in. However, everyone doesn’t win a satellite. Many people don’t even have time to play them. With that said, ACR Team Pro Katie Lindsay asked ACR if she could gift a $2,650 Venom seat to a woman in the poker community. They said yes.

Not only would a woman win the seat but also an hour of free coaching from Lindsay’s husband and one of the most successful online poker tournament players in the world, Chris Moorman.

Many players responded to Lindsay, including Sarah, also known as “KushQueenPoker.” She is the mother of six children. The pandemic hurt the family financially, and she had little time to play many satellites. “I would use this as an opportunity to start streaming,” she wrote on Twitter. And by popular vote, Sarah won the ticket.

That wasn’t the end, though. This week, Lindsay announced that she and ACR will award one more seat to someone in the poker community.

People can tweet to Lindsay on behalf of themselves or someone else. This one doesn’t appear to be solely for female players.

As Lindsay mentioned, her inspiration for this giveaway came from Nadya Magnus, who was playing in a Wynn Poker series in mid-December. She tweeted that she wanted to award two seats – worth $5,300 each – to women who hadn’t had the opportunity to play much poker but wanted to compete. She actually ended up giving away three seats. Wynn Poker heard of the giveaway and offered complimentary rooms at the Encore for the winners. They also offered Magnus and the seat winners to a complimentary breakfast at the Wynn prior to the tournament. (Only two of the three women could make the breakfast, as the other was on a flight from Phoenix to Las Vegas.)

If Magnus’ name sounds familiar, it might be due to her victory in 2021 as the GPI Female Player of the Year, outranking all others around the world in tournament performances. And to bring it all together, Lindsay finished third on that leaderboard, and Kade finished fifth.

Women supporting women and trying to increase their participation in the game of poker seems to be a trend now, and a good one it is….a very good one.

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