I e-mail Michalski over at pokerati irregularly, but when we do make contact, we generally swap half a dozen e-mails or so. Today, along with other matters, he asked me why I hadn't posted anything on the wsop.com domain battle, since I'd done a whole series of pieces on it last year. It'd been settled, he reminded me.
Yeah. I learned about it secondhand from Gary Wise during the WSOP. (If it wasn't Gary, it was Snake or Chops. I disremember.)
I wrote up a blue box for the PN site when I learned about it, which lived for a normal blue-box turn, about 24 hours. 100 words. That's about what it deserved.
Also didn't care too much. The battle concluded with a whimper, not a bang, when Harrah's is believed to have made some nominal payment to wsop.com domain squatter Fed Schiavio to finally wrest the domain free from Schiavio's grasp. All of a sudden, halfway through the WSOP, the wsop.com domain started auto-resolving to Harrah's WSOP site over at worldseriesofpoker.com.
No press release or news brief on the matter. No nuttin'.
I asked Jeffrey Pollack about it. He confirmed it but wouldn't provide any details or numbers, though I heard rumors through an alternate grapevine that something was done to get the lawyers out of the mix. Schiavio was rumored to have wanted a million for it, initially; there's no announcement ever going to be made but I'm guessing he -- or rather, his lawyer -- got $100,000 or less. If anyone wants to provide corrected details I'd be happy to relay them here. These numbers are quite openly and admittedly speculation based on the facts as I know them, but, hey, they could easily be wrong. Hell, maybe he got zero, but I think some greenmail occurred.
I just don't give much of a damn about it any more. It was once an entertaining tale, but now it's just an old, blah memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment