The absurd decision to sell the “exclusive reporting rights” of WSOP and WPT tournaments has claimed its latest victim.

I logged onto MySpace earlier today to find a message from Jen (Andy Bloch’s better half). The title was “PokerWire.com signs off”. A visit to the PokerWire web site confirmed the news, with the latest post on the blog style site stating that they will only post updates as they are made available by the WPT. Live tournament coverage and the PokerWire radio show will be no more.

It was unnecessary, however, for the site to shut down. As I stated before, you cannot sell the exclusive reporting rights of anything in this country. Anybody is free to report on whatever they want to. The Bill of Rights gave us that privilege a couple of centuries ago. You can limit access to an event, but once the “news” is made public, it can easily be re-reported. Card Player Magazine can’t copyright the chip counts! You can’t own public information! Once they give their live reports, anybody is free to repost the info as “almost live reports”. There is nothing that the WPT nor Card Player can do to stop this from happening.

I still wonder who the braniacs were at the WSOP and WPT that thought it was a good idea to piss off as many members of the press as they could. “Hey let’s rub it in their faces too by sending a press release that says fuck you”. Sounds absurd, but that is pretty much how it went down.