Two dirt-dishing poker tales

If you want to dig deeply into some fascinating poker news, you’ll have to visit Haley Hintze’s two blogs.

If you go to http://haleyspokerblog.blogspot.com/, you can see all the dirt she’s dug up involving the battle for control of the WSOP.com domain. It involves alleged cybersquatter Federico Schiavio, who seized control of the domain name WSOP.com from under the Horseshoe in the latter days of Becky Binion’s reign.

According to Hintze, Schiavio, who was in charge of IT at Binion's, glommed onto the domain name and applied for ownership and registration of "WSOP" as a federally recognized and protected trademark.

Schiavio tied the battle for the WSOP domain name into knots by strengthening its connection to other registration processes and you can read about this in a lengthy, incredibly well researched and detailed multi-part post at Haley’s blog.

Haley also writes for KickAss Poker, and over at http://www.kickasspoker.blogspot.com/ you can dig into the current hissy fit surrounding Bluff Magazine’s now tainted Reader’s Choice Awards. According to Haley, It turns out the real winner of the award for best poker forum was not Pocket Fives, as published, but rather Two-Plus-Two.

Two-Plus-Two received an e-mail from Bluff about the honor and asked that it be kept confidential until publication. Bluff also sent along some banners asking for placement on the Two-Plus-Two site. Bluff was told in response that if they wanted banner-ad placement, they could buy the ad, just like everybody else.

Bluff allegedly pulled the award from Two-Plus-Two, and announced the winner as Pocket Fives. But the award wasn’t just a vanity, throw-away award; it was generated by an official reader survey, and you can read about this whole, tacky, tabloid affair on Haley's blog at KickAss Poker.