The project impossible: (A/K/A: The Dave Woods Chronicles, Part 2)

Sometimes it's blatantly obvious when someone is plotting to get you gone

(Author’s note: There’s lots and lots of personal opinion in this one. Best for me to some more venting by way of healing my soul, and let’s let the chips fall where they may.)

Hopping back into the saga of how and why I’m no longer with poker.org….

As I’ve said before, it was a long slide down the chute after the immensely talented Brad Willis was replaced by mediocre company man Dave Woods as the site’s daily content manager and de facto news editor.

After Woods’ ridiculous first-day proclamation about daily Zoom meetings, I had to get a better sense of who this guy was. I asked a few friends who I thought might know about him to give me the lowdown if they would. I didn’t get much back, and what I did hear wasn’t very positive. The first reply I received contained this: “I do not like Dave Woods, I do not trust Dave Woods, and I do not respect Dave Woods.”

I’m often unlikeable myself, so I didn’t really care much about that. The other things, though, gave me pause, and I was to learn, over time (and in my personal opinion), that they seemed to be accurate. As 2024 arrived and rolled forward, it became clear that I wouldn’t last with poker.org anywhere near as long as I’d hoped. Woods and I had sharp differences across the board, and his managerial style was quicksand for any content creation I tried to do.

I tried hard, though, to continue to be productive and valuable and find ways to contribute to the site. I really did.

As the year went on, more and more responsibilities were taken away from me, while more and more arbitrary hurdles were placed in my content-producing way. That ranged from stripping my previous right to self-publish — done under the pretense of switching content management systems, but it was never restored — to sitting on anything resembling a news scoop of mine for up to three days, thereby destroying one of the key assets I brought to the table.

I’d long been tasked with handling difficult and controversial stories as they arose, but Woods was anything but editorially courageous. Instead, he wanted fluffy pap that generated cheap web traffic, above all else. I absolutely will share a few tales in this area in future posts.

Woods also began picking away at the edges of the topic areas I was handling. Hard news stories? Really not his thing, it turned out. If an entertaining legal saga emerged, I might get to publish one or two pieces on it, and then I’d hear, “Do we really need to run this?”

I guess we didn’t need to run anything, come to think of it, but it was part of an ongoing slaghill being set before me. He also pulled me from going to the 2024 WSOP, as he and his right-hand UK editorial assistant, Adam Hampton, wanted to go themselves. On that point, I didn’t care that awful much about not going to Vegas, since I’d been very, very sick from Covid out there a couple of years earlier, much worse than I’d let on to the bosses at the time. Still, Woods was tossing out nearly two decades of experience from someone who thoroughly knew the ropes of the WSOP.

He was also, in my opinion, very intentionally obstructing my ability to produce the volume of work I’d promised to frontman and part-owner Eric Hollreiser. But in order to really make his case for me to be canned, Woods likely had to concoct some sort of defiant act on my part.

Late last October, he tossed me a project that:

1. Couldn’t be done as dictated,

2. Would have taken an overwhelming amount of time to even come close to producing quality results, if not resorting to making up the shit from thin air,

3. Didn’t fall under my job description, and,

4. Included no thought whatsoever regarding increased compensation for what would be, I estimated, an extra full-time-or-more load of work.

Also, pay for market researchers is generally a notch higher than that for content writers, all other matters being equal. In my head I dubbed it Project Impossible, but I also realized it was very probably the next part of his scheme to shove me out the door.

All this for a ‘feature’?

Well, here’s the project as tentatively assigned. You can judge for yourself:

Dave WoodsDave Woods 8:34 AM
Slack

Hey, we want to do a feature on playing poker in the States. What are all the different options, where are people actually playing, who's playing each option, etc.

1. Sweepstakes

2. Regulated

3. Non regulated

4. Free stuff like Zynga

We want to try and find out...

• Volume of players

• Options

• What are the pros/cons

• PAB input

Couild you start looking into this as a project / letting me know what you might need in terms of help/resources.

-----------------------

For a feature??? Oh, come on now. He couldn’t be this stupid, could he? There are whole companies with staff dedicated to tracking and compiling some of this stuff, though sections of his wants, like detailed breakdowns of grey-market, offshore sites, would be all but impossible to determine accurately.

I think the PAB acronym referred to PO’s Player Advisory Board, though I admit I had to look it up again for this. I’m not sure what input they could’ve provided, but that was tossed on top of the heap with the rest. That “help/resources” thing? In the greater scheme, that was not to be believed in any significant way.

My mind swirled when I realized what would be involved, with the best approach likely involving purchasing tens of thousands dollars of specialized market reports from sources such as Eilers & Krejcik or Poker Industry Pro, supplemented by state-by-state and/or international regulatory reports. Add in all the financial filings and reports from all the public companies serving the US, and God alone knew what to do about the private and offshore illicit ones.

Then, there would be weeks or months of work to sift the stuff and produce... "a feature". Shoot me now.

Add in other factors, including that I was supposed to be providing the regular content that I was hired for, and I just didn’t see that I could provide timely, quality research of this nature as requested. And I couldn’t provide accurate research on some parts of it all, at least without openly stealing content from other sources or flat-out making some stuff up.

I nudged a couple of friends, showing them the assignment and explaining the background and the impossibility of it all. I’d already had an idea of what I was going to have to do, and what I received back as a comment was roughly in line with what I was tentatively planning.

One friend wrote, “Reach out to a contact at one of those consulting firms, and tell them you need a favor, and would they please put 15 minutes into estimating that job for you. Come back, tell [Woods] that this is what it would cost. When he says ‘Don't be ridiculous,’ say ‘Okay, but that's what [the company] said.’

”The key here is to play it absolutely straight and just tell him he's an idiot without telling him he's an idiot.” I agreed, though I didn’t really belabor the point that this was also a part, I believed, of the pre-planned, long-term fuckery against me that Woods had already been conducting for months. The people I showed this to understood that part of the equation, too.

I actually did have a contact at one of the two or three research firms that compile and interpret comprehensive poker-industry data, and I did have to beg a bit, but I received some info. My research contact told me that for the parts of Woods’ proposed assignment that they’d be able to do, they’d likely bid the project at something like $125,000. It wouldn’t be able to address the offshore or private sites in any real way, but the ballpark figure I was given convinced me I had correctly estimated the scope of the project.

And as for Woods, one way or the other, he was indeed an idiot. If he truly believed I could take this on and provide any sort of reasonably timely, quality output, then he was utterly incompetent in this aspect of his role as the company’s content manager. And if he thought I wouldn’t recognize right away the massive work that his proposed project would entail, then he was an idiot that way, too. I truly believed it was both, after having suffered him for more than a year.

A day or so later, I replied to Woods, explaining that I’d done a bit of preliminary research and that the project as he imagined it was way, way beyond my capability. I also included the message from the market researcher, without identifying him to Woods, that contained the $125,000 estimate for just some of what Woods wanted.

I never heard a peep back from Woods about the supposed project. The days trudged on. Yet I was of course suspicious when, a month and change later, I discovered I’d been left off the company’s holiday employee-gift list. The gifts were nice but not extravagant, although I didn’t care so much about the gift as the message I believed was being sent.

My suspicions proved true when Woods fired me in a boo-hoo-hoo Zoom chat a couple of months later, where he told me how much he respected me but that they were moving in another direction. He gave me a ‘shaky voice and crocodile tears’ routine, but the corners of his eyes were lifted and in my opinion betrayed a small smile. I didn’t buy any of what he was selling.

Besides, it soon became clear that Woods also wanted to snipe some of the WPT and Catena Media folks that had suddenly become available while continuing to reshape the PO into the fluffy mediocrity it’s morphed into.

Raking the Muck thanks Hold'em Media and PokerLiveUpdates.com
for their support of this publication

Epilogue, but not the end of the Woods tales

There’s much more to tell about my time at poker.org, and honestly, the tales will be entertaining as hell. I fully understand that I haven’t burned a bridge here as much as I’ve bombed it into smithereens.

That comes with costs, of course. If I was 30 or 40 or maybe even 50, I’d probably stay silent in hopes of better times down the road. But I’m 64 now, and though I’m available as a writer and editor and data-entry person and more, I’m likely to have a hard time now finding a full-time gig in poker, if I’m not already blackballed or worse. I’d still rather retain my integrity and self-respect and call the situations as I see them, and I do plan to pick up some part-time gigs here and there in the future. We’ll see. The uncertainty over the US gambling tax changes is having a dampening effect across all of poker.

Sometimes a bad-luck situation hits you head-on. That’s what happened here. I’m not the easiest person to work with either, as I’ve already acknowledged, but the older I get, the less tolerance I have for incompetence and subterfuge, and I never had much of that type of tolerance anyway. So I’ll continue carving my own way through life, wherever it leads. You want respect, then you’d best treat me with integrity. In my opinion, the company failed me in that under Woods’ direction.

Until next time….