I don't know what's wrong with poker.org lately. Up until 2024, they were a fairly new but very respectable competitor to Pokernews.

Recently, they've done three stupid things within a short span of time.

First, in late February, they released an interview with Maurice Hawkins, who had been accused of stealing from a backer and refusing to pay back, despite a court judgment against him. While I was fine with platforming Hawkins to give his side, the host actually agreed with him that "racism" was involved in people's criticism of Hawkins. WTF!! No, the criticism was because Hawkins stiffed a backer and has been dodging paying him back for over 5 years, despite continuing to hit 6-figure scores in poker.

Last week, they tweeted out a cover of Rounder Life magazine in order to talk about how sexy the cover girl (a Russian poker player) looked. The problem? Rounder Life is owned by Mike Postle's best friend, who has primarily used the magazine as a pro-Postle propaganda piece, disguised as actual journalism. Everyone knew what Rounder Life actually was, but somehow poker.org didn't. Oops.

Yesterday, they posted an interview with Justin Bonomo, done by longtime poker journalist Craig Tapscott.

https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838826049581135
https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838829107130413

Again, while I don't like Bonomo, I am not a believer in deplatforming. If they want to interview Bonomo, I'm fine with that.

However, poker.org has been extremely cowardly regarding the (very predictable) negative comments regarding Bonomo.

If you're going to interview a controversial figure, you can't be a coward and hide people's comments back to the interview. If you're so afraid of negativity, don't interview controversial people!

First they hid all negative comments. Then, after realizing almost 100% were negative, they turned off comments entirely.

Here are the hidden ones: https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838826049581135/hidden



More next post...