I mentioned this in the radio chat yesterday, and it seems Druff didn't know about this, so here is a quick rundown of the story:
For those of you who don’t know, David Sklansky used to be a regular poster on the rec.gambling.poker newsgroup (more commonly referred to as RGP). However, as the poker boom was beginning Sklansky was barred from posting on RGP by Mason Malmuth. I guess even Druff didn’t know this.
Here is Mason’s response to the accusation from 2+2 where he totally pulls a Romney and says he never barred him from posting, but it became necessary for him to stop posting elsewhere! http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29...16/index9.html (Very last post at the bottom of the page):
Originally Posted by Topset72
This just isn't very accurate. Even though we started www. twoplustwo.com in 1997, we didn't begin to sell advertising until 2001. And since David was a featured strategist on our site and part of our sales pitch to potential advertisers was that he would be posting here, it became necessary for him to stop posting elsewhere. That's just simple business sense.Mason made Sklansky stop posting at RGP and wasn't very welcoming of Abdul because his approach wasn't conducive to selling poker books based on an ABC/Mirage Limit game(IMO).
As for Abdul, he was always welcome to post his strategy here. I had more than one face-to-face meeting with him where this was communicated directly, and David even was present for one of these where we talked about Mike Caro's Professional Hold 'em Report and tried to convince him that what we said about it was accurate.
MM
So what was the buzz at the time regarding Mason forcing Sklansky to stop posting? It was probably two things (as well as the reason he cited above):
• Sklansky was getting owned hard in strategy and theory discussions by other RGP posters, especially about his recent books.
• Sklansky would tilt because he had a few RGP trolls (think the “Post you’ve been waiting for” thing with Sue but not as creepy) and would troll himself
If you’re really good with the Internets and the Google you can find the discussion in the old RGP threads as well as Sklansky’s posts where other players/theoreticians like Abdul had a field day on. Here is one link that I found around the time he left RGP: http://www.pokerfied.com/poker/An_Ap...ky_510467.html