Quote:
Originally Posted by vibrato
Chad, I will of course follow this story.
My point to you is that you and PokerNews bear responsibility here for running PR for this event. You and the company were compensated from this tournament, were you not?
You act like you're doing the community a favor by spreading Dan's story.
The revenue from this event would not have been close to what it was without PokerNews and Jeremy Smith.
They were hired to do a job. Chad and PokerNews bear the same responsibility that the dealers do. They were compensated from the tournament, too. If you are hinting that they should return all the money they were paid, I don't think that is a reasonable expectation.
This isn't the first wannabe start-up poker tour run by players and it won't be the last. Danny hired some tournament people whose reputations were considered an asset. What should PokerNews have done differently?
Unless Chad has some sort of hidden stake in Midway, he has a purely self-interested reason for writing about this that has nothing to do with doing the poker community a favor. He should obviously wish to make sure that he and PokerNews have a clean name coming out of this. Honestly, he should probably be a bit resentful towards Danny that he has to put in extra work to do this.
I would also consider that Chad lives within driving distance of this tournament. I would not be shocked if at some point he has played in charitable games in Rockford or Chicago. He certainly knows some of the people who played in this tournament, has played poker against some of them, and probably considers some of them friends. It's likely some of those people are owed money.
Of course, this works both ways. He knows a lot of people. We can wonder how likely it is that Chad heard negative private comments about Danny and whether he did his homework on that.
One reasonable question to ask is whether Chad thinks that pushing too hard now and not giving this some time makes it less likely that people will get paid what they deserve.