Trainwrecks Wins $10M, Gives Away $1M to Viewers (and Haters)

Tyler “Trainwrecks” Niknam has maintained his love and hate relationship with gambling streaming for a while now. After it transpired that slots are the second-grossing non-gaming category on Twitch, it’s easy to see why streamers are drawn to it. Trainwrecks is very easily the torchbearer of this community.

Often struggling with his promotion of gambling content, Trainwrecks decided to make up for what he perceives as bad behavior and gave away $1 million to his viewer this holiday season. Understandably, this sudden gesture of goodwill sparked a lot of traffic, and it temporarily caused some trouble with the stream and the donation website.

Time to Turn a New Leaf

As he was playing, Trainwrecks ended up hitting total jackpots across the board worth $10 million on January 1. His viewer counter kept climbing up and ecstasy had seized the comment section which gushed out with a mash of emoticons and Internet slang.

Then he said he would be giving $1 million to followers. Yet, Trainwrecks has not always been a winner. In a spur-of-the-moment peek behind the curtain, the streamer explained that he had been losing money over the nine months prior, suggesting that he had been in the red all along.

However, in a Twitter post, he explained that he had promised to be more generous if he somehow managed to hit $10 million. The $10 million, Trainwrecks explained, was also a fresh start and a way to wipe the slate clean. However, he is not stepping away from gambling. Wired named Trainwreck earlier this year as one of the streamers to have accessed websites that were supposed to be unavailable to US customers.

Stream Haters Get a Piece as Well

Trainwrecks managed to add as many as 25,00 new subscribers over a day, spurred by his sudden act of generosity, and in doing so he also briefly crashed the stream. Originally, the streamer wanted to use the Nightbot giveaway site, but it soon got clogged and stopped working.

Trainwrecks was quick on his feet, and he moved the draws to another donation website. Twitch was hardly able to keep track of the entries, but Trainwrecks didn’t hesitate, and he did pay out a total of $1 million in various sizes.

In his generosity, Trainwrecks was indiscriminating. He openly said that some of the people tagging along to get a prize were stream haters who were just “farming up their Reddit karma.” He did not care, as wiping the slate clean meant giving a second chance to everyone.

Sure enough, the viewers who had come to offer insensitive comments were not appeased by the token of generosity and they kept piling on (mostly on the comments of those stream haters who didn’t get a piece of the pot).

Trainwrecks did say at one point in the past that he would consider quitting but this never came to be. Meanwhile, Twitch has not relented on its hard stance on gambling with the company suspending all referral codes to gambling sites integrated in streams and often the streams themselves.