Tiffany Michelle

The 2008 World Series of Poker Main Event took place last week. In recent years, the longest lasting female player has basically been a stranger to most of the poker world. This year, that wasn’t the case. Tiffany Michelle is known throughout the poker world as the girl who conducts player interview for PokerNews.com. It turns out Tiffany can do more than just ask questions while holding a microphone. Not only did she finish in the money in the 6,844 player field, she made it all the way to 17th place and won $334,000!

At times, Tiffany appeared poised to win the $9M first-place prize. With under 50 players to go, she found herself as one of the Top 3 chip leaders for a significant period of time. Unfortunately for Tiffany, her luck ran out when her Ace-Jack ran into pocket Aces after an Ace came on the flop.

Tiffany’s deep run in the Main Event was not without controversy. Days after busting out in 17th place, reports surfaced that PokerNews was investigating their legal options against Tiffany. As it turns out, PokerNews sponsored Tiffany (paid her $10,000 buy-in) for the Main Event. When she found herself deep in the tournament, a representative from Ultimate Bet, a notoriously shady online poker site, approached Tiffany about wearing their logo while she played. Tiffany agreed to do so (no doubt for a handsome price tag). When news of this reached PokerNews, they were outraged. As Tiffany’s sponsor in the tournament, they wanted to have a say in what online poker rooms she was sporting alongside her PokerNews logo. Since Ultimate Bet has a bad reputation in the poker world, it clearly is not in PokerNews’ best interests to have their logo aligned side by side with Ultimate Bet’s on Tiffany’s low cut blouse (that will most certainly be seen by millions on ESPN’s World Series of Poker episodes).

The dust is yet to settle on this tiff between Tiffany Michelle and PokerNews. What’s unfortunate for Tiffany is that she took a life changing opportunity (having a lot of chips and being approached by sponsors deep in the Main Event) and handled it about as poorly as possible. Tarnished relations between herself and PokerNews could very likely result in the loss of her job with PokerNews. Moreover, reputable online poker rooms might now be hesitant to award Tiffany a sponsorship deal since she comes with some baggage as a result of her decision to promote Ultimate Bet.

One thing is for sure, this girl has some skills at the poker table. Jobless or sponsorless or both, I expect we’ll see Tiffany’s name pop up on poker leaderboards for many years to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 3:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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