PokerNews.com and Tony G. Accuse CardPlayer Magazine of Stealing Their 2007 Live WSOP Updates!

PokerNews.com. along with majority shareholder and world-renowned poker player Tony G, have officially called out CardPlayer magazine over its apparent theft of their chip counts and live updates during this year’s World Series of Poker.

As if the 2007 World Series of Poker couldn’t have gotten any more loopy, right?

Well yesterday, it OFFICIALLY did.  With rumors already circulating around both the online and live poker community that CardPlayer was deliberately stealing the live chip counts and updates from PokerNews.com, the drama worsened even more when PokerNews Limited’s majority shareholder - Tony G. - wrote an official statement in his blog regarding the ordeal.  In an excerpt taken straight from his blog, Tony G. doesn’t hold back his displeasure for the situation:

“We are having our best year ever and right now we should be enjoying the finest moment of our life as a company.  We are at the WSOP and are supposed to have an agreement with Bluff to be the exclusive provider of updates and chip counts. But unfortunately over the last few days, we have been pirated and simply stolen from by many of our competitors  - including Cardplayer.  Cardplayer is hiding behind a legal fence that they were standing on top of just this time last year– kicking anyone who dared try to climb it in the teeth. ”

His statement also directly implicates CardPlayer as using PokerNews’s updates and copy/pasting them onto their own site.  Not only that, but CardPlayer is refusing to give any credit to PokerNews for the work being done by its staff of over 40+ employees who do both the official chip counts and live media updates at the Rio!  Now what makes this story ever more intriguing is that CardPlayer just LAST YEAR accused Bluff Magazine of doing the same thing — and just as Bluff did last year, CP is now clearly hiding behind a legal loophole that doesn’t exactly stipulate what kind of coverage it can and can’t use from other media outlets.

Jeremy Enke, who is both a chairman for PokerNews and the owner of PokerAffiliateWorld, has stated his distaste for what CardPlayer is doing in a post over at PAW.  Now from what I’ve been reading, it looks as if PokerNews might have some sort of leg to stand on if they did indeed pursued some sort of legal action against CardPlayer.  It was clearly stated months ago that PokerNews had earned the exclusive rights to do both the official chip counts and live updates.  In fact, PokerNews is the ONLY media outlet allowed in the Rio poker room to cover the event.

It has been roughly 24 hours now since this story broke, and there has yet to be any statement issued by Jeff Shulman, who with his brother, own and operate CardPlayer.   With the poker community already looking down at CP, I think it would be very interesting to see what the response will be.  I’m hoping that CardPlayer will step up and do the right thing eventually, but I’m not holding my breath at the moment.  If CardPlayer wanted the updates so bad, then they should’ve done a better job at negotiating a deal with Harrah’s and the WSOP.  PokerNews paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be the official provider of WSOP updates, and its only fair that CardPlayer respect that from a business standpoint — get your head out of your ass Jeff and save your company from any further embarassment.

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