It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in the weekend when Brad Willis declared in earnest that he “actually wanted to win this thing” ahead of his award for Best Journalist at the Global Poker Awards.
The Global Poker Awards weekend is always a blur of meetings and dinners for the poker media. It could have come up at any point. Willis repeated it in his acceptance speech, followed by a joke about AI that climaxed with a Nacho Barbero pun and perhaps a bit of silence from the room. The post-show consensus was that the joke bombed, but that may or may not have been the intention. Bombing can be an art.
There wasn’t a sense that Willis would win — he just wanted it. It’s always hard to tell how these awards will go. PokerOrg accounted for half of the Best Journalist nominees with Sarah Herring joining Willis in the top four, but it felt like a longshot. It was a tough category and they were up against truth-seeking David Lappin and Nick Jones, who has covered breaking news in online poker with a great deal of depth and information.
Yet it wasn’t much of a surprise when Willis won. Any four of them would have made sense.
Sharp Dressed Man
Elsewhere at the Global Poker Awards, our very own Paul Oresteen was nominated for his story 'I've lost all my other hobbies' – Ari Engel opens up on poker and a torn heart , an interview with the 18-time WSOP Circuit ring winner about generational trauma in the midst of a career year and the fallout from the October 7 attacks in Israel. Oresteen was up against Jonathan Raab, Connor Richards, and Lance Bradley, with Raab taking the prize for his in-depth investigation into the BotFarm Corporation.
The real PokerOrg show-stopper from the evening was Oresteen’s outfit, a custom 'Paul-sized' flowery-pink jacket that still serves its original purpose as a not-so-subtle tribute to his sister Laura, who died of breast cancer in 2023.
Jeff takes care of the jokes
Brad's acceptance speech joke may have been drawing dead but Jeff Platt brought the goods in his role as co-host (with Drea Renee) all evening long. The emcee opened the show with a four-minute monologue, taking aim at Joe Stapleton's comic book, Nikki Limo's YouTube demographic, WPT's purge, Caitlin Comeskey's poker chops, and Phil Hellmuth's recent WSOP Main Event history. Check out the entire thing:
End of the open bar?
The effects of the open bar started to show when Paul O'Reilly and JP McCann accepted the award on behalf of the Irish Poker Open for Best Standalone Festival/Series.
Irish Poker Open players are well known for packing an equal share of entertainment into their poker week with lots of karaoke, drinking, eating, singing, and drinking. It was in the true spirit of the festival that O'Reilly stepped up to the podium:
"I don't have a speech. I was going to do a speech, but I met a guy at a bar today who just got married. I was doing the speech on my phone and I don't have my phone and I don't have the paper. I asked him where his wife was and he didn't know where his wife was, but he had a cool hat and a cool belt and his belt matched his shoes so we forgot about that and had six pints."
O'Reilly managed his way through the rest of the acceptance, blaming the open bar in the PokerGO Studios for extended pre-show drinking time. The two had stumbled into the backdoor before doors were open, circumventing a check-in line at the other side of the studio. The extended open bar was a secret about the Global Poker Awards that is now out of the bag.
Meanwhile, Platt declared that it may be time to end the open bar. He was joking, but Nikki Limo reiterated the point in a boozy accepted speech for Best Short-Form Media that closed out the show: "Wow, why did you save me for last? Is it because you wanted the drunkest person to speak? I think you're right, Jeff, maybe no open bar next year."
Photos courtesy of revolutionpix/Global Poker Index
