Abby Merk was not at the table when her best friend won a WSOP Circuit ring - but she found a way to be there anyway. The CoinPoker ambassador posted a photoshopped FaceTime image of herself celebrating alongside her friend, with a message that was equal parts heartfelt and self-aware.
MY BEST FRIEND JUST WON A RINGGGG!!! Never met a person more deserving, can't give you a big enough congrats!!
Abby Merk (@abbypoker_)
MY BEST FRIEND JUST WON A RINGGGG!!! Never met a person more deserving, can’t give you a big enough congrats!! Btw- since I’m always across the country when u run deep and can’t be there in person, a photoshopped FaceTime will have to do for now. LMAO CONGRATS! ❤️ @Alex__Loveless https://t.co/Jfq0oqo3H4
"MY BEST FRIEND JUST WON A RINGGGG!!!" Merk wrote, in the kind of all-caps announcement that no longer needs translation. "Never met a person more deserving, can't give you a big enough congrats!! Btw - since I'm always across the country when u run deep and can't be there in person, a photoshopped FaceTime will have to do for now." The joke lands because it is also clearly true - Merk is perpetually in a different time zone, at a different event, grinding the same circuit from a different angle.
The post did not name the friend or the specific event, but the WSOP Circuit ring format is well understood in the community - these are legitimate, earned pieces of hardware in the broader WSOP ecosystem, and winning one is a meaningful result for any tournament player. The fact that Merk's first instinct was to post publicly, get creative with the congratulations format, and call out her own absence with humor rather than guilt says something about her character and her friendship.
It is also a reminder that poker's social fabric - the friendships built across hundreds of shared tournament floors, shared bad beats, shared cashes - is one of the sport's least-covered stories. Merk is one of the more openly social figures on the circuit, and posts like this one are a window into what the game actually looks like from the inside: not just chips and results, but people genuinely invested in each other's wins.