One tweet nets Kevin Pollak a $10,000 World Series of Poker seat

Jay Busbee
· Senior writer
Kevin Pollak at the World Series of Poker. (Via Andrew Feldman/ESPN)

You know Kevin Pollak. You've seen him in "Casino," or "The Usual Suspects," or "A Few Good Men," or any of hundreds of other movies and TV shows. And, thanks to a single well-timed tweet, you can now see him, for the moment, at a World Series of Poker table.

Pollak is an avid poker player, and the World Series of Poker's Main Event is now underway at the Rio in Las Vegas. Anyone can win poker's richest prize, but you have to pony up a $10,000 entry fee. As ESPN notes, Pollak, who's played in the Main Event since 2012, found himself without a sponsor. So he sent out a little help-a-brother-out tweet, like so:

He got one bite: Chuck Fried, the president of TxMQ, an IBM solutions company. Over the course of two hasty hours, Pollak and Fried negotiated both sides of the deal: the buy-in fee that the company would give the actor, and the publicity that the actor would give the company.

The result? Pollak got his seat and TxMQ got major bang for its marketing buck, all from a single tweet. "I feel like I've already won," Pollak told ESPN. "This is an exciting day, and I can't thank them enough."

Through the first three two-hour levels of play, Pollak has reached 47,000 chips, up from the starting point of 30,000 chips. He's got plenty of goodwill and media coverage. Not a bad payoff for a single tweet.

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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter.