There's also this incident: [...]I got a call from Mel Moser, who was the marketing manager at GGPoker. She had "great news". They would be sponsoring my entry

There's also this incident: [...]I got a call from Mel Moser, who was the marketing manager at GGPoker. She had "great news". They would be sponsoring my entry into the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Heads-up tournament – a $10,000 buy-in event. "I hope you are excited!", she said. I was not. What I felt was unprepared, and out-of-my-depth. My attempt to throttle the rise of panic was futile. My attempt to feign excitement even more so. "Oh… wow… this is …. amazing… thank you," I replied. Like, was she now legally obligated to do this? Could she just say "uh no thanks, I won $10k and that is more than enough for right now"? If she did, how long did she sit there weighing her options between dropping off or trying to see how far she could ride this tiger she'd accidentally sat on? In her conclusion she basically says that, whether or not she beats Mr Rich Butthead, the true victory was the friends she made along the way. But somehow my general experience with entertainment media suggests that a lot of those people will stop calling her if she loses; they see a chance to hitch themselves to a possible rising star, and it's gonna be nowhere near the first time they've done that and eventually made some cold calculations about how much time and effort to invest in her if this one win was just a lucky fluke.