It might have been a little belated, but a former contestant on "The Bachelor" now joins Patriots, Bills, Saints and Eagles fans as someone disappointed with the results of Wild Card Weekend. DraftKings announced on Saturday that Jade Roper Tolbert was no longer the winner of a million-dollar daily fantasy contest that took place in early January.
Like any normal person would after winning $1 million, Roper Tolbert celebrated on Twitter on Jan. 6 that she had beaten over 100,000 entries to post the daily fantasy score of the first weekend of NFL playoff action -- those tweets have since been deleted. Among the more salient red flags that went up for people upon seeing the online celebrations was the fact that her husband, former "Bachelor in Paradise" contestant Tanner Tolbert, was a high-volume daily fantasy player.
The problem wasn't that Tolbert was feeding his wife tips so much as it was the fact that the two could potentially collude to win a competition. How this would work is that the couple would each submit the maximum amount of lineups per contestant allowed--150 in this case at $25 a pop--and make it so that each lineup was unique to the others. Since this was a violation of the DraftKings community guidelines, the company decided to investigate the victory.
This leads us back to Saturday when DraftKings released this vague statement on Twitter:
— DraftKingsNews (@DraftKingsNews) January 25, 2020
The statement makes no mention of the ex-reality TV contestants, but anyone who had even an inkling of an understanding of this situation knew what the company meant. Plus, one could go back and check the standings of the contest Roper Tolbert had said she won. She was no longer the listed winner of the Millionaire Maker contest -- that has gone to a user named spclk36, who came in second -- and Roper Tolbert's entry was removed from the contest all together. Her husband told ESPN that she had not received the money as recently as Tuesday.
Tolbert has already expressed frustrations over this process earlier this month to ESPN saying, "No one has ever said a peep about us when we lost for 17 straight weeks. Then, of course, somehow Jade picked the right lineup, got the million and the spotlight got shone on it. And people, especially since she's a woman, assume that I do it all for her. If I had won, I bet no one would've raised a flag."
"I just wish if [DraftKings] had problems with anything, they would have addressed them early on, since they knew we were husband and wife."
Surely this news won't make those frustrations any better.
