Last month, the cryptocurrency-based online casino Duel aired a blackjack livestream that it said would be hosted by former pro kickboxer turned controversial masculinity influencer Andrew Tate.<\/p>\n
But while the dealer\u2014a bald man with dark stubble, wearing a black T-shirt, tight suit, and sunglasses\u2014bore a resemblance to Tate, he didn\u2019t act much like the swaggeringly macho and voluble streamer. His mostly silent performance was punctuated by sudden bouts of singing, vigorous twerking, and still more ridiculous dance moves, the most impressive being a full split on the blackjack table. He also spontaneously made out with a male assistant posted to his side, pulling him in for the kiss by his necktie.<\/p>\n
The performance went viral, but sometime after the livestream began, Duel\u2019s founder and owner, Ossi Ketola, claimed that the casino had been duped by an influencer management agency. \u201cWe were promised a deal where Andrew Tate would deal blackjack for one of our live games,\u201d Ketola wrote in Duel\u2019s Discord server. \u201cWhen he arrived at the studio, we realized we had been rugged. The person that stood in front of us bore some resemblance, but he wasn\u2019t the real Andrew Tate. It was an impostor. By this point we are too far in and the costs have been incurred, so we are forced to run with it to save face.\u201d Duel did not respond to a request for comment regarding the alleged bait and switch.<\/p>\n
But just who was<\/em> that \u201cimposter\u201d? His real name is Brian Michael Hinds, though many quickly recognized him as \u201cBottom G,\u201d a half-German, half-Barbadian social media star who, while looking like Tate, acts in every way as his exact opposite, flamboyantly twerking and twirling from Miami Beach to Barcelona, ready to burst into song at any moment. Even the name \u201cBottom G\u201d is a queer-coded play on Tate\u2019s self-applied title of \u201cTop G.\u201d<\/p>\n Photograph: Ekathep Michaels; courtesy of J. Connor Management<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Hinds, 29, tells WIRED that Duel fully understood it was hiring Bottom G, not the real Tate, who has separately advertised the casino on terms that are not publicly known. In a statement to WIRED, Duel denied deliberately hiring a lookalike.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course that was the whole request,\u201d Hinds says of his Duel livestream on a Zoom call from Istanbul, where it\u2019s 2 am. An avowed night person, Hinds, whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes singing on Germany\u2019s version of American Idol<\/em> and dancing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, says he has no fixed address, traveling wherever opportunity knocks. \u201cI’m for the streets,\u201d he declares. \u201cI\u2019m everywhere.\u201d Because of how the Duel clips blew up, Hinds says, he now has offers to perform his songs at a show in Bangkok and at a wedding in Las Vegas\u2014less because people want a Tate look-alike per se and more because they\u2019re thrilled by his joie de vivre. \u201cMy true fans, they get it,\u201d he says. Hinds also plans to work with Duel again.<\/p>\n Such is the surreal life of an aspiring gay pop star who found accidental fame through a strange connection to a man notorious for his extremely misogynist views. (Both Tate and his brother have been charged with rape in multiple countries; they have also been charged with human trafficking in the UK. The pair have denied all allegations.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/69fa6b1a9165f81762ebba4b\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/Andrew-Tate-Impersonator-Culture-0.jpg\"\/)
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