New Vegetarian Prop Bet on Offer for Tom Dwan

Tom Dwan has a new vegetarian prop bet offer on the table.

As everyone knows, the world’s top high stakes poker players are big fans of prop bets. The bet that has drawn more attention than any other in recent memory was the vegetarian prop bet that Tom Dwan gave to Phil Ivey, where Ivey couldn’t eat “anything that moves” for a year and in the end would be paid $1 million. It got a lot of attention thanks to being a central part of the conversation on the recent season of High Stakes Poker, but Ivey paid Dwan $150,000 to back out after just a few weeks. Now one poker player from Iowa is offering to take up Dwan’s million-dollar vegetarian prop bet, with a few twists. 

Mikey Knuckles says that he’s willing to take all the same terms as Ivey’s original bet, with a few new ones thrown on top. In addition to going completely vegetarian for a year, he will lose 100 pounds in the same timeframe. If he loses either part of the bet, he loses the entire bet. If you think that sounds easy, consider that Mikey is a Kansas City Barbeque Society Certified BBQ Judge who, in addition to judging more than 25 barbecue contests in the last year, has eaten meats and dairy his entire life and never once considered a vegetarian lifestyle. 

If Mikey wins, Tom Dwan would have to pay out $2 million – half for the weight-loss prop, and half for the vegetarian prop, with $1 million of that cash going to the Williamsburg, Iowa Public Library Fund. Meanwhile, if Mikey loses, he’ll have to work at the local McDonald’s (or any fast food restaurant that will hire him) and give up poker for the next year. As a 25-year veteran of local poker games, that would be a steep price for him to pay – though whether it’s worth the other guy putting up $2 million in cash is debatable.

The bet (full details here) is still just a proposition at this point, and in reality the chances of Dwan accepting it are slim to none. But wouldn’t it be cool if Dwan decided to go along with it? Then we’d have the drama we’d all hoped for when Ivey took the vegetarian prop bet in the first place.