T. Chan F#&ked By Shannon Elizabeth & Annie Duke at the Playboy Mansion
Terrence Chan wrote in his blog yesterday that he was screwed out of a WSOP package by Shannon Elizabeth and Annie Duke.
Chan was invited to a charity poker tournament which was played at the Playboy Mansion. According to Chan, the tournament had a pretty crazy structure. Players started with 2500 chips, the blinds started at 100-200 but went up every 15 minutes. They also offered rebuys of 1000 chips for $500, but after all this was for charity.
Chan ended up making the final table, when the tournament director came by and said that due to time constraints they would have to wrap up the game. On the for the winners of the event were:
1st: 2 WSOP main event seats plus hotel and junk
2nd: A US Open golf package
3rd: 51″ TV
This is when things went downhill for Terrence. Annie Duke knocked out another player on the first hand after the tournament director came by when her A9 beat out the opponents AQ after she hit trip 9s.
According to Chan, “This is where it really starts getting bad. Shannon looks around and realizes that her and Dannenmann are #1 and #2 and tells Dannenman to fold every hand. Dannenman, for the record, is not three but about eight sheets to the wind. He has been more or less on a 3-hour alcohol IV and drunk out of his mind. Annie Duke has been sitting immediately behind him for the entire final table telling him what to do on a number of hands (“you have to call”/”automatic call”, that kind of thing). Annie assesses the situation and tells him the same thing as Shannon, that he should fold every hand and collude against me. Which is okay, you know, because Shannon Elizabeth and Steve Dannenmann are celebrities and therefore matter. Who gives a shit about the random guy no one knows or cares about?”
This really got to Chan. He says that, “[He] assign no blame to Steve Dannenmann. He really did nothing wrong aside from not telling Annie to FOAD. He was drunk out of his mind, and alcohol makes people pliable. That said, I have no doubt that if he did not have Annie in his corner, he probably would not have realized the situation he was in. I have a bit of a problem with Shannon, as she clearly violated the rules and did something that in the poker world is extremely unethical. However I cannot fully condemn her because she is new to the game, not a serious long-time player and may not have known better.
The person I have a real problem with in all of this is Annie Duke. Annie Duke has been playing poker a lot longer than I have, and I learned very early on in my poker career that sitting two feet away from someone and telling him what to do on specific hands is illegal and immoral. “One player to a hand” is something that every poker player learns very early on in their poker careers, and it’s absolutely shocking to me that someone as experienced as her, a bonafide poker celebrity in the public eye, would blatantly break this rule and think there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Chan feels that he was screwed out of a WSOP seat and has contacted the tournament organizers to file a complaint. He is hoping that he will be rewarded with a seat to the WSOP after what happened, but it seems unlikely that this will happen. He did receive a response today from the event organizers, but they will need to get back to him in a few days after they perform an investigation.
