Torelli Releases Unedited Footage Of The Alleged Angle Shoot Incident & Fires Back At Polk

(Photo: Alectorelli.com)

It’s been a long time coming – 35 days to be exact – and it raises just as many questions as it answers. It’s Alec Torelli’s response to the angle-shooting allegations levelled against him, and it focuses just as much on Doug Polk’s vlog appraisal of the incident as it does his own questionable actions.

For those who haven’t heard about the whole somewhat iffy saga, check out this initial report here which focuses on Polk’s take on things, but basically Torelli had big chips hidden behind smaller ones - which led to a long and confusing hand on Poker Night in America when Daniel Wolf decided to shove and Torelli suddenly had $10K more than Wolf expected to see.

Allegations of Torelli going north before the hand (somehow adding an extra silver $5K chip to his stack, seemingly without the table or the production crew being aware of it) and a rather ill-considered offer of ‘a piece of my future action’ to make up for his ‘error’, and we had all the makings of an ‘angleshooter/innocent man’ discussion.

So to Torelli’s response, which had been eagerly awaited for over 4 weeks – and it’s a cracker! Torelli dissects everything in minute detail, apologizing for not having his chips on show, but in the process having a serious go at Doug Polk for ‘deliberately misrepresenting what happened’ and blaming Wolf also for not speaking up during the hand.

According to Torelli, Polk went out of his way to edit the hand in a way which shows one of his main vlogging competitors in a bad light – but this isn’t Polk’s view as he recently discussed in a podcast with Chicago Joey and mentioned on Twitter.

The 35-minute response from Torelli takes the ‘scattergun’ approach to defense, picking out Polk, Wolf, the floor and other players as having a huge effect on what happened – his own part in it (apart from his apology at not having his big chips on show, which has been questioned as to its veracity) a relatively minor affair which in his own estimation saw him trying his best to find a solution.

With 40 pages of discussion on the 2+2 forum, it’s obviously a very contentious issue – and Torelli isn’t coming out of it very well, neither before nor after his lengthy video response.

Polk, of course, can’t be expected to show every single part of the full show – and generally it seems that his version of things was fairly balanced, but Torelli feels as though he’s being singled out for special treatment.

Torelli faced a barrage of criticism online for failing to address what many saw as the biggest issue from the whole affair – ‘going north’ by allegedly sneaking an extra $5K chip onto the table.

He later released a very short video explanation of what happened, claiming he did inform the crew and it only put him a few hundred dollars over the table limit, but both these points have been questioned: the PNiA crew seemed unaware of any add-on and the arithmetical wizards on 2+2 claiming it put him some $2500 over the maximum.

Well, Torelli made everyone wait, but the general consensus is that he has only dug a deeper hole for himself – the majority of players and fans believing he did exactly what he was accused of and has failed to bluff his way out of a bad situation with a very sketchy video.

Toreli’s vlogs are very popular so it will be interesting to see if they take a hit from this overall poor showing.