Steve Albini was a semi-famous record producer. He was the founder, owner, and principal engineer of the Chicago recording studio "Electrical Audio", where he recorded thousands of records, for acts including Nirvana, Pixies, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, the Jesus Lizard and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

He was also an active recreational poker player. He had three good scores at the WSOP, earning two bracelets. In 2013, the first year he qualified to play the WSOP Seniors event, he finished 12th for about $40k. In 2018, he won the 7-Card Stud event for $105k. He then won the $1500 HORSE event in 2022.

He liked poker so much that his Twitter handle was @electricalWSOP, even though he didn't tweet about poker all that often.

In the record industry, he was mostly well regarded.

In the poker community, he was also well liked, especially because he was pleasant at the tables, and various schlub poker pros loved the idea that they had befriended a fairly famous record producer.

He passed away on May 7 at the age of 61, from a heart attack. It was not likely drug related, as Albini had long claimed to have sworn off drugs and alcohol due to witnessing his father's alcoholism.

Albini was not known to be sick nor have existing heart trouble. He did vanish completely from Twitter on December 17, 2023, without warning. However, he did claim in November 2023 that he was "about done" after getting a right wing PragerU ad when searching for the topic of "transgender":

https://twitter.com/electricalWSOP/status/1720294602245038268


As you might guess, Albini was very left wing. My one interaction with him was a political argument. He entered a fairly obscure political thread of mine, where I was mocking a ridiculous article by left wing agitator Noah Berlatsky. I'm not sure how Albini found my thread, because he didn't follow me, nor did that particular thread get wide engagement. Albini came at me in a very condescending fashion, likely assuming he was dealing with an uneducated right wing rube he could easily run over. When I kept my cool and pointed out a lot of ridiculous fallacies in Berlatsky's article, Albini seemed to realize he was in an unwinnable argument, and quit responding. That was my only interaction with him, and I don't believe I ever played with him at WSOP.

I didn't have the warmest feelings for him after that exchange, but I didn't hate him. He wasn't the first left wing poker player to attack me on Twitter, and he wouldn't be the last. I didn't bother to look much up anything about him beyond my existent knowledge of his success in the record industry.


When Albini passed away on May 7, many poker pros were memorializing him on Twitter like he was a saint. I have seen other examples of poker pros who received high acclaim from the community after their death, but these were always pleasant, non-controversial people like Chad Brown and Perry Friedman. I was surprised that, given Albini's outspoken and often condescending behavior on Twitter, there still seemed to be nothing but sweet things said about him on poker Twitter.

However, upon looking at Twitter outside of poker, I found reference to some pretty bad controversy in the early 2020s, which dwarfs any of his rudeness on social media.

I'll get to that in the next post.