Home / Poker News July 2008 / Tiffany Michelle turns her back on former employer, teams up with Ultimate Bet
Tiffany Michelle turns her back on former employer, teams up with Ultimate Bet
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2008-07-16 07:28
The WSOP Main Event has hardly reached the final table, as fallout from behind the scenes is already all over every poker fan’s computer screen.
Tiffany Michelle, the only female competitor remaining for the last day of action, who set her sights on becoming just the second female poker player ever to reach a Big Dance Final table, is at the center of the newest controversy involving two of the online poker industry’s superpowers: Ultimate Bet and Pokernews.com
A former Pokernews.com employee, Tiffany Michelle was reportedly staked by the company she worked for, in all the WSOP events she played in this year including the Big Dance. According to Tony G., the authority figure behind the news site and world-famous poker pro, he decided to buy Michelle into several events so she could interview as many of the pros up close and personal as possible. He said he also staked several other people to maximize the exposure his enterprise would get from the WSOP. In this respect, Tiffany Michelle had had a signed contract which clearly outlined the fact that she’d been sponsored by Poker News, as well as her obligations, namely to conduct her interviews and to only claim 33% of her winnings (as the rest would go to her sponsor).
After her quite extraordinary deep run though, the reporter turned into poker celebrity decided to exploit a loophole in her contract with Pokernews and she promptly signed a sponsorship deal with the online poker site Ultimate Bet (the one also endorsed by Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke), without ever letting Pokernews.com in on her intensions – or so Pokernews.com says.
As a direct consequence of Tiffany Michelle’s decision, Pokernews.com decided to pull the plug on the affiliate setup it had with Ultimate Bet, and exclude the site from its affiliate network.
Even though the official Pokernews.com position on the matter is that UB was excluded on account of its past problems with cheaters and high-profile insiders gaining access to players’ hole-card information, the real reason is probably clear to everyone: they feel betrayed, and sabotaged by Michelle, her agent and the website they’d had such a lucrative relationship with.
