Did I miss it or does she never actually say WHY she has to go on to play this dude? She talks about how now this tournament is being arranged for her after winning a tournament that her coaches pressured her into playing, but never says anything like “it turned out that winning this tournament meant I was obligated to go play against this butthead dude”.
If there is something like that then it feels like she’s omitting an important lesson of “look before you leap” from the summing-up of What I Learnt. Which is one her coach needs to maybe learn too since he was just as surprised.
[...]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 $10k and that is more than enough for right now"? If she did, how long did she sit there weighing her options between dropping off or trying to see how far she could ride this tiger she'd accidentally sat on?
In her conclusion she basically says that, whether or not she beats Mr Rich Butthead, the true victory was the friends she made along the way. But somehow my general experience with entertainment media suggests that a lot of those people will stop calling her if she loses; they see a chance to hitch themselves to a possible rising star, and it's gonna be nowhere near the first time they've done that and eventually made some cold calculations about how much time and effort to invest in her if this one win was just a lucky fluke.
She could probably say no, but I think most people would not turn down a free entry in a tournament with a massive price pool. It is essentially a 10,000$ gift if you play as well as your opponents, in her case the expected value of entry is probably closer to 8000$, since she would be playing against opponents stronger than her.
The tournament was probably held to find someone to play against Dan so part of the terms of winning in the contract would be participating in the one on one game. It'd be cheaper than directly paying someone to play against him probably and the revenue from the game with Dan would cover the prize cost of the feeder tournament.
Probably, yeah. It'd be nice if she'd spared one damn sentence to say "it turned out that this prize came with an obligation to go play against this asshole I'd never heard of in a few months".
If there is something like that then it feels like she’s omitting an important lesson of “look before you leap” from the summing-up of What I Learnt. Which is one her coach needs to maybe learn too since he was just as surprised.