17
We Need a Voice
I just joined the World Poker Association today as a founding member. It’s an association that really needed to happen. I’ve been involved in a couple of them that have never taken off the ground because it takes a lot of money and it takes the support of the poker players to get it going.
They aren’t even going to elect a board of directors until they get a thousand members. Hopefully, all the top professional poker players will start as founding members and that will bring some funding into it and we’ll start to see some changes. There are just so many issues out there right now that need to be addressed: rakes in the casino, logo issues, standard rules that everybody should be using, things of that nature.
There are definitely issues going on right now with Harrah’s and how they’re exploiting us as poker players, how it’s getting more and more expensive for us to play. They’re trying to do the best that they can, but there are still some issues. In the $2,500 Short-Handed event a guy lost $107,000 worth of chips and they couldn’t find his bag of chips so they just went to the cage and brought out $107,000 worth of chips. That’s real money. Basically, Harrah’s didn’t care that they lost that money. They didn’t stop the tournament long enough to figure out where this guy’s $107,000 went.
And now the European players need to have a TIN number, and they’ve embarrassed them at the table and pulled their chips off the table until they’ve paid their taxes. And they’ve done it right there in front of everybody. So they lose our money of $107,000 and yet embarrass this European player over $13,000.
These are issues that have to be addressed. Right now there’s no one speaking out. We need a voice. We need to stand together just to keep things fair.
