Details, Details

The day is nearly over and I’ve barely got time to post, so I’ll just share the most curious thing I saw while passing up and down the poker aisles today.

Apparently Ben Mezrich, he of the highly-blinkered book Straight Flush that weirdly whitewashes the Absolute Poker scandal-ridden saga, is making television appearances and writing op-eds in support of online poker, perhaps not coincidentally in concert with the publication of his book in paperback. “I’m out there in the trenches trying to get online poker legal again,” he tweeted, adding an obligatory happy-face emoticon.

A piece in the Boston Globe by Mezrich yesterday argued in favor of Massachusetts considering legislation to legalize online poker in the state. Regarding Mezrich’s op-ed, Steve Ruddock wrote an interesting response over on the Online Poker Report titled “Misinformation in Massachusetts Gives False Hope to Online Poker Expansion.” Ruddock explains how Mezrich’s op-ed appears to have been largely based on outdated information, referring in particular to a Massachusetts budget amendment that was already voted upon and rejected a year before.

Read Ruddock’s piece for the full skinny. It looks like the Boston Globe piece was subsequently edited to remove the archaic element of the argument, and in between appearing on MSNBC and other running around Mezrich defended his editorial and its argument as still current (although now I’m having trouble finding that tweet in his timeline).

Like I say, I’ve run out of time today to explore this further and so don’t really want to comment too much on it. After all, details are important.

(Photo: “Goed Zoekveld” by Bart van de Biezen, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0.)