Poker.org tweet about Bonomo interview brings out negative comments, they try to hide them, then they disable them

[Dan Druff]

I don't know what's wrong with poker.org lately. Up until 2024, they were a fairly new but very respectable competitor to Pokernews.

Recently, they've done three stupid things within a short span of time.

First, in late February, they released an interview with Maurice Hawkins, who had been accused of stealing from a backer and refusing to pay back, despite a court judgment against him. While I was fine with platforming Hawkins to give his side, the host actually agreed with him that "racism" was involved in people's criticism of Hawkins. WTF!! No, the criticism was because Hawkins stiffed a backer and has been dodging paying him back for over 5 years, despite continuing to hit 6-figure scores in poker.

Last week, they tweeted out a cover of Rounder Life magazine in order to talk about how sexy the cover girl (a Russian poker player) looked. The problem? Rounder Life is owned by Mike Postle's best friend, who has primarily used the magazine as a pro-Postle propaganda piece, disguised as actual journalism. Everyone knew what Rounder Life actually was, but somehow poker.org didn't. Oops.

Yesterday, they posted an interview with Justin Bonomo, done by longtime poker journalist Craig Tapscott.

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838826049581135

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838829107130413

Again, while I don't like Bonomo, I am not a believer in deplatforming. If they want to interview Bonomo, I'm fine with that.

However, poker.org has been extremely cowardly regarding the (very predictable) negative comments regarding Bonomo.

If you're going to interview a controversial figure, you can't be a coward and hide people's comments back to the interview. If you're so afraid of negativity, don't interview controversial people!

First they hid all negative comments. Then, after realizing almost 100% were negative, they turned off comments entirely.

Here are the hidden ones: https://twitter.com/pokerorg/status/1778838826049581135/hidden



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[Dan Druff]

The other problem here, as you can see in that highlights tweet, is that Bonomo continues to lie about his 2006 multi-accounting scandal.

Given that Bonomo has not been caught cheating since then, and it's been 18 years, it would be very reasonable for him to take responsibility, apologize, and highlight the fact that he's played ethically since then.

Instead, he lies about the 2006 online poker landscape, claiming that multi-accounting tournaments was considered acceptable by the standards of the day.

THIS IS A COMPLETE LIE, and Bonomo knows it.

Cash multi-accounting was indeed commonplace and accepted in 2006, provided you weren't at the same table with yourself.

However, tournament multi-accounting was never accepted nor commonly done! The reason is that you cannot control where you sit in tournaments. Therefore, you can easily end up at a table with yourself, which of course is horrible and extremely unfair to other players. Indeed, Bonomo admitted that he ended up with himself at certain tables, but that he "created distractions" so it wouldn't be as much of an edge! LOL!!!!

This was why Bonomo's situation was such a big scandal at the time. He was only the second tournament regular to be caught doing this. The other high profile multi-accounting scandal was Josh "JJProdigy" Field, but Field was only 16 at the time, and doesn't seem to be in poker anymore.

Those two scandals were huge in the mid-2000s. It's complete bullshit for Bonomo to excuse this away as "everyone was doing it" and "the times were different". Both statements are completely false.

This is just a case of him lying about something 18 years ago, in order to maintain his phony moral high ground on other issues, and hoping nobody will remember. I remind people of the truth whenever he does this shit. My tweet today already has over 30,000 views.