2008 WSOP Blog

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Picture Imperfect: WSOP Photo Gag Order

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. If that's the case, new media regulations at the 2008 World Series of Poker have cost PokerListings.com roughly four million words. Not to be melodramatic or anything, but those regulations have potentially cost the poker world a lot more than our personal word count.

It's not something that has received a lot of attention in the days leading up to the '08 WSOP, but with the new regime change in the World Series media offices has come the announcement that poker media outlets, including PokerListings.com, must delete all photographs taken at the Series within 72 hours of their publication.

Officially, this rule is to prevent the exploitation of both players and the World Series itself by nefarious and unscrupulous individuals who presumably were using a few of the thousands of WSOP pictures published by sites like PokerListings for unauthorized commercial purposes.

If this were 2008, Yang's victory would be text-based.

This is all fine and well, but if players are being victimized by photographs taken by credentialed media, we've never heard about it.

Obviously the World Series has a right to protect itself against exploitation, but as far as its players are concerned, any potential negatives relating to possible unauthorized use pale in comparison to the positives brought on by allowing professional photographers to use their talents to record and publicize this event.

The WSOP has made a number of head-scratching decisions in the Jeffrey Pollack era as far as media coverage goes, such that you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe Harrah's and the World Series don't actually like free publicity.

Phil Hellmuth wins his eleventh bracelet.

With the new photography rule, they're effectively strangling independent photography in favor of the established and official providers, in essence preventing any stories being told other than those that emerge from a World Series-approved lens.

This is fine, but what about the stories that the official providers miss? Why restrict yourself to one interpretation of this massive and multifaceted event?

And beyond the World Series (which employs enough lawyers and other assorted suits to avoid any major exploitation), the claim that the rule has been implemented to protect the players smacks of a justification with no real substance behind it.

History, destined for oblivion.

Players, almost to a one, love to be photographed. They love it because it allows them the illusion of being famous. They love it more because it makes them money, either directly or indirectly, via sponsorships with online poker rooms.

Poker players who are not named Phil Hellmuth, Howard Lederer or Joe Hachem (i.e. who aren't a full-time part of a poker room's "team") can earn money based on the number of times they appear on the pages of your favorite online poker source wearing the logo patch of a sponsoring poker room.

Often times, this money is pretty substantial and can translate into a significant source of additional income for a midlevel poker professional. If media outlets like PokerListings can't take pictures of pros, however, this revenue stream (and the corresponding free advertising for poker rooms that send hundreds and thousands of players to the WSOP via satellite every year) dries up and poker players suffer.

Exploited? Or exploiting?

Even poker players without entry-level sponsorship stand to suffer from reduced photographic exposure. The business side of poker is a name-recognition game, and players build their reputations through the poker media.

Players stand a lesser chance of building reputations if they're not showing up on poker media Web sites, and you'd better believe those players aren't showing up on Web sites that have to delete their day's work after 72 hours of exposure.

This claim that players are being exploited is, in my opinion, suspect at best and at worst a fabrication. Before the WSOP announced their photography gag rule, the concept of players having their images grossly and blatantly misused was almost unheard of, particularly for those players not named Hellmuth and/or Chan.

Doesn't mind being photographed.

The justification seems even more ridiculous when you consider that World Series organizers have made drastic changes to the 2008 schedule, moving the Main Event final table to November as a means of rekindling interest in the game - a move that opens up those final nine players to more dangerous and far-reaching exploitation than a couple of copyright-violating Web sites could drum up.

In any case, when the National Football League (and other bona-fide sporting organizations) wishes to stop those who are misusing its images, it sends lawyers. It doesn't prevent interested and qualified media from making photographic records of its events.

It's seems too obvious to even mention, but at this point in poker's history it's not beneficial to anyone to limit the amount of exposure players receive. The decision to strangle the flow of independent media coverage of the World Series smacks of the same sort of dollar-based decision making that has characterized the WSOP's publicity efforts over the last three or four years. Like many of the Series organizers' recent decisions in that regard, this one will hurt the players and it will hurt the game.