Scolded for Poker Tournament Spoilers

Rick Dakan, while praising my blog in general, takes me to task here and here for occasionally revealing the winners of a poker tournament before they've aired on TV. I do apologize for diminishing his ability to enjoy the suspense of those tournaments on television, but I should also say that I'm not likely to stop doing that, and perhaps I should explain why. It never even occurs to me that it's a spoiler, primarily because I have never watched a poker tournament on TV without knowing in advance who won the tournament. That's because I read the poker newsgroup, which has constant updates on what is going on in poker tournaments around the world, virtually up to the minute. Whenever there is a World Poker Tour event going on, for instance, there's someone there reporting the action and the results to the newsgroup as it happens. When someone gets knocked out in 7th place and fails to make the TV show, someone is posting not only that fact, but likely the hand that knocked them out, within a half hour.

In addition to that, many of the players post the results on their own webpages. Paul Phillips, for example, posted daily updates on his webpage a couple weeks ago while playing in the Legends of Poker event at the Bicycle Club in LA (and DID get knocked out in 7th place, just missing the televised final table by the eventual winner, Doyle Brunson). Anyway, my point is that because I've never watched a poker tournament on TV without already knowing the winner in advance, it never really occurs to me that I should keep the results a secret. I don't post such spoilers in order to spoil anyone's enjoyment, but only if they are relevant to something I felt like writing, and the reality is that sometimes my observations of something that happened is colored by the fact that I know the result.

That's why I enjoyed watching Mike Matusow being a dick to Greg Raymer and Raymer's response, because I already knew that Raymer is the guy who ends up crippling Matusow, after which he gets knocked out and blubbers like a baby. So when I mentioned it a few weeks ago when posting my observations on the ESPN telecast from the night before, I wasn't trying to spoil anything for anyone, I was just giving my perspective, and that perspective is obviously affected a great deal by the fact that I, along with anyone else who reads RGP, already knew the outcome. In the future, however, I'll try to remember to at least add *SPOILER* to the title so anyone who wishes to avoid such information can do so.