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#391 – News
No bad-beat story starts, “I had eight-five offsuit and ….” And you know there’s no happy ending when a news story starts, “The Los Angeles County Coroner confirmed ….”
That’s from the beginning of CardPlayer.com’s story announcing the death of Brandi Hawbaker at 26. According to Card Player, her death on April 13 was determined to be by her own hand.
A better piece of news: the World Poker Tour and five poker pros settled their differences. The antitrust suit brought by Annie Duke, Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Andy Bloch, and Phil Gordon against the WPT has been resolved. The WPT is changing the language in the release players have to sign to play in its events.
Yesterday (Saturday) was Day 1-A of the WPT Championship. I can’t say I would have played in it if I had known this would be resolved but I definitely would have been there to write about it if I knew. For me, any event with Annie, Howard, Andy, Phil, and Chris is fun to cover.
I remember seeing Andy Bloch at the Doyle Brunson WPT event at the Bellagio in October 2005. He had entered without signing the release and someone from the WPT had pulled him away from his table in Bobby’s Room after the tournament started to get him to sign. He wouldn’t and they threatened to disqualify from the tournament. As he took the piece of paper to sign it, he said, “I’m signing this under duress.” The WPT representative snapped, “You’re not signing it under duress.”
I remember seeing Chris Ferguson at the WPT Championship in April 2006. He showed up because there had been negotiations to modify the release. He was even under the impression that the WPT had agreed to to specific language as a result of negotiations between the WPT and his attorney. That turned out to be false and he was surprised and, I thought, a little hurt. He showed me the $25,000 Bellagio chip in his wallet that he expected to use to enter. He waited around to speak with Steve Lipscomb, signing autographs non-stop. When Lipscomb walked by and agreed to discuss it, he blew up when Chris asked me to come along.
I’m in Scottsdale and haven’t spoken with any of the five, though I’ll try to find out of they’re playing as well as their opinions about the settlement. It sounds like they are getting essentially what they wanted from the start – limits on what the WPT is allowed to do with their images in exchange for letting them buy into poker tournaments filmed by the WPT.
It sounds like a satisfactory resolution for both sides, and long overdue.
Perhaps the timeliness of the issue passed. Though poker’s popularity is still huge, ratings aren’t going up and new opportunities for players to capitalize on their poker fame aren’t materializing. The issue is still important, especially to players who can or have capitalized on licensing their images to video games and endorsing online poker sites, but the WPT’s reach (in capitalizing on those images) and coattails (in “making” stars out of poker players) have proven limited.
Maybe enough time passed where the WPT decided it could be reasonable without appearing to knuckle under. Or maybe the players got tired of fighting and just want to play some poker.
