Fossilman's Account Hacked?

[bruceypants]

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Have you not been paying attention ?!?!?

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Yes, I've been paying attention, I'm just not buying Raymer's spin. For one thing, this lawsuit is way more analogous to a lawsuit between GE and Microsoft than it is between your average poker player and the "evil" WPT. 99.99% of poker players will never play on the WPT so this will not affect 99.99% of poker players positively in any way. Furthermore, of those .01% who do play in the WPT (or the WSOP or any big tourney), only .01% of them will ever be offered an endorsement deal. So, this lawsuit could only ever benefit .0001% (1 in 100,000) poker players. This is just a lawsuit between two super-rich organizations and will have no positive benefits whatsoever for the large majority of poker players. For Greg to say that this will benefit other poker players is pure BS.

These 7 poker players signed their rights away before they had an image to sell, just like the American Idol contestants do. Now that the WPT has made them famous, they want all the monies from their images to themselves. It's pure greed and simple greed and nothing else. There is no altruism here.

If you read, the complain, items 57 and 58, all the WPT has done has used footage from one of their tournaments in a video game and at one of their fantasy camps. Big, whoopty [censored]. It's not like they put Raymer's chubby mug on the packaging of the video game and used his unsavory image to try to sell the game. It's only when you start playing the video game do you see a small snippet of footage (I think the footage includes Jesus). The players are making a mountain out of a molehill. I assure you that no one bought the video game to see Chris Ferguson play a hand of poker. For one thing, a consumer wouldn't even know about the footage until they bought the game.

By the way, anyone who doesn't think the income stream of these 7 goofballs won't be relevant is living in a fantasy land. From the complaint:

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63. Exclusion from such donkaments can be devastating to elite, high stakes pro poker players' careers.

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The plaintiffs have made their income streams an issue with that statement (and several others) and it will be discoverable. I'm going to laugh when we all find out that Jesus makes $2 million per year from Full Tilt. Then everyone will be able to see just how greedy these guys really are.



I find this particular item from the complain to be very funny:
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28. A critical input for televised, high stakes poker donkaments is the participation of elite, high stakes pro poker players whose skills and notoriety make the events highly attractive to broadcasters and poker fans.

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http://wptlawsuit.com/files/29194-27742/Complaint.pdf

I guess these self-appointed "elite 7" are not so critical since the WPT is refusing to let them play without signing a release. These guys have way, way over-estimated their importance. The WPT can defintiely survive without the participation of these 7 tools. In fact, their lack of participation is much more likely to benefit the average poker player than this lawsuit, because then average poker players will have a better chancce in these big tourneys.