Card Player: Bastion of Journalistic Integrity

We here at Wicked Chops Poker are not so much into "journalistic integrity" as we're not into "journalistic integrity."

Don't get us wrong. It's not like we don't occassionally try to provide hard-hitting, opinionated and thought-provoking articles. Cause we do. But we also like to throw in some bombast, which means pompous speech or writing, and a few untruths here and there to spice things up a bit. Essentially, we're like that rico suave guy at the bar saying whatever we can to bang that chick, and you, the reader, are that chick we're trying to bang. Hopefully we're entertaining enough to score on occassion.

So because of this, we don’t prop ourselves up as the ultimate "poker authority" and we have absolutely no qualms with playing favorites or giving preferential treatment to a kind advertiser. However, if we do, we also make it clear to you that we are sacrificing some "journalistic integrity" because it's the right thing to do.

Which apparently is a value that Card Player doesn't see eye-to-eye with us on.

Card Player, coincidentally, claims to be "The Poker Authority." And they are…if "The Poker Authority" now means packing a magazine and website with an almost endless supply of poorly constructed, often boring, stale, and predictable articles WHILE ALSO churning out fluff pieces that are clearly advertising buys for online sites and not telling you, their readers. 

We’re not naive. Sure the entities that comprise Wicked Chops Enterprises LLC all look younger than our years, but our youthful appearances hide the hard-knock life knowledge we learned while surviving on the mean streets of (sub)urban America. So we know that money makes the world go round. In America, at the end of the day, he who has the most money wins (we’d say “he or she” but the thought of a woman ever being wealthier than a man is truly laughable…even difficult to type in a joking sense…we must just move on).

And we’re sure Card Player is laughing all the way to the bank as they whore out yet another cover and feature piece to an online site. At the beginning of the year, it was Calvin Ayre and Bodog (our favorite site, by the way, so click the link above to play where Wicked Chops Poker plays). Last month, Full Tilt got the full fellating treatment with a cover photo that looked suspiciously like the print ad they're running in magazines now because it is the print ad they're running in magazines now. And most recently, Card Player bends over and takes the money spew from NakedPoker.com, loosely framing a story about the not-naked-enough-if-your-name-is-Naked poker site into an examination of how poker sites are using sex to sell.

Granted, we'll admit, you don't wanna know what we’d do if any of these online sites came at us waving a million dollars in our face. Sure, we already have our yachts and butlers and use $20 bills to toast marshmallows, but a million dollars is still a million dollars, and the list of things we’d do for a million dollars would make Bob Saget's Aristocrats joke seem like a frigin' nursery rhyme.

But we are not Card Player. We don’t claim to be poker’s leading legit source of news and strategy. We don't have that unspoken commitment with our reader's to uphold a standard of journalistic integrity like they do, even though we still try our hardest to do so.

Card Player's inept 2006 WSOP coverage was an insult to their reader's and to the integrity of poker journalism. Masquerading advertiser-paid cover features as legitimate news just sinks their reputation even lower.

Comments

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[aishwarya rai]

good site

[wiley]

go back and read some of their WSOP coverage talking about CardPlayer...their criticism of the "Poker Authority" was long before they popped up in Bluff...which i believe this month was the first time.

[WayneBullet]

Those were ads? I had no idea, I just liked the article, so much I checked out the sites. Wow, I am such a sucker.

I was just reading Bluff magazine the other day. I noticed a section for Wicked Chops, could this have anything to do with the not so nice writing about Cardplayer.

I don't buy Cardplayer, I read it online. I am a subscriber to Bluff. I have no allegiance to either magazines though.

Maybe Wicked Chops should have a note like financial advisors have on TV. Something like Wicked Chops does not write for Cardplayer, but do have a small section a competing magazine.

[Kid Dynamite]

word up boyz. Cardplayer has gone to shit. It's unreal that there are so many good, entertaining writers out there (achem!), and Carplayer publishes that crap every other week...

[bobby]

The day I read

"Cardplayer Magazine are nobodies, the site is garbage."
- Anna Benson

is the day I will read Cardplayer again!!

[Ian M.]

Great post as usual. I remember laughing when I first saw the Full Tilt issue of cardplayer, wondering if this might be the first time a major publication had unabashedly printed an advertisement on the cover.

One would think a magazine branding itself as an "authority" would at least make some effort to make the cover look like a cover (as they did with the Ayre cover), instead of a logo-plastered ad. So after I finished laughing and thought about it, I was pissed off.

There's a lot of madcap manifestations of poker in the media, but cardplayer is a somewhat significant stitch in the current fabric of poker, and because they claim to be the "authority", they should be trying to booster the integrity of poker journalism and the game itself, not treating it like a cash-grab.

[Kevin Mathers]

More quality writing at work, from yesterday's Poker News regarding the 2nd Pro-Am Equalizer heat:

Heads-up play began with blinds at $1,500-$3,000. Arias had about $450,000 to Arias’s $250,000. The two are friends and they both seemed to be happy the other one made it down to heads-up.