Salomon Ponte Turfed Out of Poker Night in America

On Saturday night, Poker Night in America aired its $25/$50 NLHE cash game on the CBS Sports Network, with the players gathered at the Choctaw Casino in Durant including Shaun Deeb, Brandon Cantu and Doug Polk. Also taking part in the big game was controversial pro Salomon Ponte, aka “Hashtag King”, who spent most of the time insulting his fellow players, with his antics since leading to his twitter account being suspended.
Salomon Ponte won the 2014 WPT DeepStacks $1,100 Main Event for $344,420, with his victory accounting for 85% of his live winnings. Ponte is also no stranger to controversy, and seems to bask in the notoriety he attracts from his many insults and foul-mouthed tirades, which were on full display during his recent televised appearance.
Shaun Deeb enjoys a certain amount of controversy himself, but Ponte more than crossed the line of acceptable behavior after insulting Shaun Deeb by calling his wife “fucking ugly” and saying that he’d “rather be dead than have your fucking wife.” Furthermore, Ponte did all this while trying to bait Polk into playing him heads-up, before refusing to commit himself after Polk readily agreed to the proposition.
Deeb busting him from the game acted as a catalyst for some of Ponte’s more offensive comments, after which he seemed to relish the controversy by stating that he was “tilting the two biggest bitches in poker.” Ironically, Ponte even then had the gall to ask Polk and Deeb for a loan in order to rejoin the game, but in the end he was turfed out by management for filming Deeb.
In the meantime, Shaun Deeb has since appeared on Joe Ingram’s Poker Life podcast, and said that he would boycott any television show that gives Salomon Ponte any air time. Ponte’s has also garnered a lot of negative publicity on social media, with Joseph Liberta accusing Ponte of being “a completely delusional degenerate” trying “to garner all the attention he was seeking at the expense of poker.”