When WPT Global announced the signing of Ren Lin as their newest ambassador on Jan. 11, the social media reaction was stunning, and immediate.
Tweets were posted and deleted, the official World Poker Tour and ClubWPT Gold accounts got into a public inter-WPT squabble with WPT Global, and the general public reaction was to sit back and enjoy the show.
Lin, a former GGPoker ambassador, faced suspension as part of a cheating scandal after offering real-time assistance during a major GGPoker online event. And as surprising as it was to see the WPT brands openly fighting on social media, an unintended addition entered the fray.
David Lappin and Dara O’Kearney, the hosts of the long-running, award-winning ‘The Chip Race’ podcast, dissolved their sponsorship with WPT Global in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. The two Irish poker players, who’ve hosted ‘The Chip Race’ since 2015, decided the WPT Global brand no longer aligned with their values. Each had previously spoken out about Lin’s behavior at length.
“We were very much on the same page,” said Lappin. “This was a line not to be crossed.”
📣 ANNOUNCEMENT pic.twitter.com/zPqEdR8yyR
— 🎙 The Chip Race 🎙 (@thechiprace) January 13, 2026
To understand why they agreed to give up a lucrative sponsorship deal, a dig into the history of ‘The Chip Race’ offers some important clues.
Humble Origins
Long before becoming unlikely characters in the Ren Lin saga, Lappin and O’Kearney started a podcast under humble circumstances. The pair, who originally met in 2011, came together in 2015 for a seven-episode trial run of a local, Irish poker show. A friend of Lappin’s worked for a podcast company that produced shows about rugby and horse racing, and reached out to try something new.
“We agreed to make the first season, which was seven shows, no financial remuneration, no sponsor, nothing like that,” said O’Kearney. “But we said, ‘Well, look, we’ll see if this works. We’ll do seven shows for free. Then hopefully you guys will be able to go off and get a sponsor and make it worthwhile for us to continue. The show really hit the ground running. In the first year, the audience just grew from episode to episode. It was an Irish only podcast at that stage, but we did actually get a bit of an audience outside of Ireland.”
Following the first season of ‘The Chip Race,’ O’Kearney enjoyed the biggest live success of his career, finishing second in a $1,500 no-limit hold’em event at the 2015 World Series of Poker. The news was less rosy upon his return to Ireland.
“Unfortunately, I went off to Vegas to play the World Series, had my best ever World Series, and came back very excited that the show was going to continue, but unfortunately, the people who owned the podcast company went into liquidation.”
With ‘The Chip Race’ and its name tied up in a financial mess, the show appeared headed towards the forgotten annals of poker history. Eighteen months later, Unibet entered the picture.
A Long And Fruitful Partnership
In 2017, Unibet, the European online poker platform and live event brand, reached out to O’Kearney and Lappin, separately. After each agreed to sign on as ambassadors, a discussion about bringing back some form of ‘The Chip Race’ quickly came together. The pair bought back the rights to ‘The Chip Race’ themselves, and Unibet signed on as the title sponsor.
Dara O’Kearney at the WSOP
This new version of ‘The Chip Race’ hit the ground running. After some growing pains, and nailing down some technical elements, ‘The Chip Race’ grew its audience beyond Ireland. That was thanks in large part to attracting guests like Jennifer Tilly, and Jake Cody. It was also about building a show that appealed to a wider audience, with segments that appealed to both the serious poker player and the casual poker fan.
But perhaps most importantly, Lappin and O’Kearney set a clear precedent for how the show was produced.
“They were very easy to work with,” O’Kearney said of Unibet. “They just let us do our own thing. We were very adamant from the start that it couldn’t just be a party political broadcast for whoever the sponsor was. That would limit the audience too much.”
For eight-and-a-half years, ‘The Chip Race’ thrived with Unibet at its side. It won awards, built a worldwide audience, and stood out as a consistent voice in the poker media world. But after the French National lottery purchased Unibet, and the company decided to focus on France, an English speaking podcast presented by two Irish poker players no longer felt like a fit.
A New Beginning
In 2025, as the final days of ‘The Chip Race’ under the Unibet banner wound down, Lappin and O’Kearney had about 10 weeks of lead time before their contract ran out. As they sought out a new presenting sponsor, their earliest thoughts turned to a pair of discussions they’d had the prior year.
“We’d been approached by WPT the previous year, with a view towards poaching us from Unibet,” said Lappin. “At that point, we’d already seen the writing on the wall with the direction Unibet were going in. So we were open minded to the possibility of going to WPT.”
In 2024, Lappin and O’Kearney had conversations with two separate entities under the WPT banner, representing both WPT and WPT Global. What they thought had been a coordinated effort had instead been two independent pursuits, though only the WPT Global interest persisted into 2025.
During a live tournament in Ireland, O’Kearney struck up a conversation with Cameron Soane, the Ireland marketing manager for WPT Global. A few months later, in June 2025, ‘The Chip Race’ was officially under the WPT Global banner.
Seven Months Of WPT
While ‘The Chip Race’ under the WPT Global banner continued, in many ways, as it had under Unibet, there were some subtle shifts that were clear from the earliest days. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though.
“I think we always felt like WPT being a much more significant brand, size wise, they would maybe feel a difficulty with, say, their direct rival, GGPoker, being promoted on the show,” said Lappin. “PokerStars a little bit, but to a much lesser extent. I don’t want to say censorship, but they certainly tried to lead the show a few times in ways that we didn’t anticipate. I suppose we tolerated it, because again, we kind of recognized that they were a bigger brand, maybe feeling that they were in a more direct competition with certain entities in a way that Unibet never was.”
‘The Chip Race’ proceeded with business largely as usual, at least from a public perspective, over the next several months. In mid-October, allegations against Ren Lin generated significant controversy, and both Lappin and O’Kearney expressed their displeasure during subsequent episodes of “The Chip Race” show “The Lock-In.”
In December, when Lin popped up at WSOP Paradise, Lappin penned a scathing editorial for Vegas Slots Online in which he skewered GGPoker and WSOP. What many didn’t realize at the time is that Lin wasn’t wearing any GGPoker patches or branding in the Bahamas. But he wouldn’t go sponsorless for long.
On the evening of Sunday, Jan. 11, Lappin and O’Kearney were each in the midst of Sunday poker sessions in Ireland. A notification rang out from Lappin’s cell phone, and in the moment he had no idea what was in store for him, and the podcast. WPTGlobal put out a promotional post on X announcing their newest ambassador signing, Ren Lin.
Making A Stand
“I had a little dinger on my phone for all WPT, WPT Global or ClubWPT alerts, if they tweet,” said Lappin. “I was playing online. Dara was playing live in Galway. I might have been literally the first person to read it, to be honest, because I was looking at my phone at the moment that it dinged as a notification. I saw it, I immediately screenshot it, and sent it into my group chat with Dara. And, well, I was kind of like, ‘What the fuck?'”
🚨 NEW AMBASSADOR 🚨
Tony ‘Ren’ Lin joins WPT Global as our newest Ambassador!
One of the most accomplished players on the global live circuit, Tony brings over $16 million in live earnings and years of success on poker’s biggest stages.
Welcome, Tony! 👏 pic.twitter.com/QvD13HDKjL
— WPT Global (@wpt_global) January 12, 2026
Lappin watched intently as the largely negative reactions piled up. In the midst of sniping between WPT Global, the official WPT account and the ClubWPT Gold account, WPT Global deleted the initial PR post promoting Lin. After O’Kearney wrapped up his live session, he and Lappin had a proper conversation about the state of play.
“We squared our opinions, that we were on the same page with this, and that, you know, this was, this was basically the end for us,” said Lappin. “And while we’re having these conversations, we’re watching the [official] WPT account say they’re, ‘distancing themselves from this decision, we don’t approve of their ambassadors,’ or whatever the wording was. Right before we went to bed, or at least before I went to bed, there was the deletion. The tweet was taken down.
“So we actually went to bed that night thinking maybe we don’t leave, because if they’ve seen sense and they’ve realized that it’s got such bad backlash publicly,” continued Lappin, “And it’s got the other bits of the company going, ‘Oh, we don’t like that.’ Maybe it’s provoked an internal conversation up the chain, and they’re going to do the right thing here, which is not sign him.”
The Fallout
The pair requested a meeting with WPT Global to discuss the situation. Before the call, however, a new message on WPT Global’s X account reinforced the commitment to Lin as an ambassador.
David Lappin at the WSOP
“The tweet reappeared before the meeting,” said O’Kearney. “And yeah, we went ahead and had a not very long meeting with WPT Global, in which it was clear to both of us that we couldn’t continue with them.”
Reactions on social media were almost exclusively positive, but O’Kearney and Lappin felt that a larger poker audience, especially casual fans, didn’t grasp the seriousness of the form of cheating Lin engaged in.
“It surprised me that a lot of people kind of took the reaction was like, ‘Oh well, this is the least pernicious form of cheating.’ And I mean, don’t get me wrong, some recreationals said that to me as well, they were like, ‘Oh, well, you know, I’ve been deep in tournaments, and I’ve asked my mate what to do in a certain hands. But it’s not quite the same thing. It’s not the same thing as going to one of the best players in the world and saying, ‘What should I do in this hand?’ And the reason why I feel it’s a particularly bad form of cheating, is that for it to happen, you need to know somebody who’s you know on Ren’s level, and you need that person needs to be willing to break the rules with you.”
Lappin went on to allude to how rare it is to catch an act like this with indisputable evidence, and the message it sends to render a light touch penalty.
Moving Forward
The decision to depart WPT Global wasn’t easy for Lappin or O’Kearney, but it was the only one. They didn’t want to continue to collect a pay check until the clock ran out on their contracts, and both felt speaking out publicly was the only way forward.
In doing interviews about their decision, and speaking out on social media, both hope to raise awareness.
“I reckon I could go down to the poker floor in Galway, walk around and ask people what they thought about the story,” added O’Kearney, “And 90% of the reaction would be, ‘Who’s Ren Lin?’ Of the remaining 10%, 9% would ask what’s the problem with what did he do? A lot of it has just been that people don’t really understand why we left, and what the problem was. I’ve had private conversations with people and explained to them what happened, and why, and every time I’ve done that, people understand the decision.”
As they seek out a new sponsor, ‘The Chip Race’ appears poised to carry on independently, for the time being. They’re going back to their roots, focusing on the lead-up to the Irish Poker Open, one of the biggest events of the year. Back to what brought them together in the first place.
“We don’t really know what the future holds right now. It’s too early to say,” said Lappin. “We’ve had a couple of initial meetings, but no more than that. Dara and I talked about how it’s just nice to have the opportunity to reset a little bit and put out a couple of shows for us. I suppose what I’m trying to speak to here is that there’s always a little bit of whimsy and romance. As podcasters, you’re trying to do something that feels right.”
