A poker player who solicited donations for a Las Vegas event lied about dying from cancer. Hear about it at Urban Legends. In A Stranger Truth, a poker player who said he had terminal cancer and accepted thousands of dollars in donations so that he could play in a World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas now admits it was all a lie. Rob Mercer told the Las Vegas Review Journal that he made up the stage four colon cancer diagnosis for his GoFundMe page in June