An amateur poker player who claimed to have terminal cancer so he could raise money to enter the World Series of Poker Main Event admitted he was lying about his diagnosis.
Rob Mercer of Vallejo, California, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in an exclusive phone interview Tuesday that he did not have terminal stage 4 colon cancer when he started a GoFundMe account in June to fulfill his dream of playing in the WSOP’s $10,000 buy-in No-limit Hold’em World Championship.
“I did lie about having colon cancer. I don’t have colon cancer. I used that to cover my situation,” Mercer said. “What I did was wrong. I shouldn’t have told people I have colon cancer. I did that just as a spur-of-the-moment thing when someone asked me what kind of cancer I had.
