This week, the Poker News Daily web series “The Showdown with Jon Friedberg” welcomes two-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner Dutch Boyd. The controversial poker player lets loose on a variety of topics, including PokerSpot and the ongoing TwoPlusTwo lawsuit. View Part 1 and Part 2.
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Before getting to the interview, Friedberg discussed the recently announced WSOP rematches that will take place during the 2011 tournament series. Chris Moneymaker will face off against Sammy Farha in a rematch of the 2003 Main Event finale, while Phil Hellmuth and Johnny Chan will recreate the magic from 1989.
On the upcoming rematches, which will air on ESPN, Friedberg lambasted, “I think the idea is absolutely stupid and I really wish they weren’t doing this. No matter what, you can never recreate the moments and therefore I don’t think it’ll have anywhere near the same level of excitement. I really hope this isn’t a desperate attempt for the World Series to get some more airtime on TV beyond the Main Event… I also think it’s unfair for players who are trying to build names for themselves today.”
Boyd then joined the show and noted that even though he holds a pair of gold bracelets, the industry tends to take a “What have you done for me lately” mantra: “I think that in poker, you’re only as good as your last tournament. I constantly feel pressured to prove that I am a relevant player because there are a lot of guys with two, three, and four bracelets that no one has ever heard of.”
The interview then focused on PokerSpot, which was the first site to offer online poker tournaments and split pot games back around the turn of the century. “It’s depressing when I think about PokerSpot,” Boyd acknowledged. “My little brother and I started this site and we had a couple of other partners. We were doing everything right… The only other online site when we got the idea and started developing was Planet Poker… The whole thing just kind of crashed. We tried to sell it a few times.”
Boyd confessed that he missed out on a lucrative opportunity with PokerSpot: “I was pretty close to being a billionaire. Instead, I got to be one of the most hated people in poker for a while. I like to think that time heals all wounds and it has been over a decade since PokerSpot failed. The fact is I’ll never outrun it.”
“There have been a lot of sites that have run into the same problems as PokerSpot ran into, which were for lack of a better word ‘innocent’ problems,” Boyd told viewers of “The Showdown.” He added, “One of the main things we can point to is that we all used our real names. The reason people knew who to throw mud at was because from day one of PokerSpot, we didn’t hide.”
Boyd is also an avid purchaser of domain names. In fact, he’s picked up 5,000 domain names since 2003. “I do a lot of domain investing,” Boyd bluntly admitted. “In 2004, I was going through a night registering hundreds of domain names and one of the ones I checked to see if it was available was TwoPlusTwoPoker.com and it wasn’t taken. I didn’t even think about it again until last summer.”
Boyd’s rights to TwoPlusTwoPoker.com expired in 2009 and he opted not to renew. However, the dual bracelet holder received a letter from TwoPlusTwo asking for $15,000 in damages: “When the lawyer e-mails me and says if you don’t give us $15,000, we’re going to respond with a trademark suit, I responded with a two-word answer. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience, it’s to be a little more politically correct with your responses to lawyers.” A lawsuit is ongoing.
Check out the rest of this week’s episode of “The Showdown.”