The Sheldon Adelson Saga Revisited, Part 1: Rich Muny’s Amateur Hour

The poker world’s ruffled feathers in the wake of LV Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson‘s recent bashing of online poker continues to reverberate. While a few mainstream outlets have begun to pick up on Adelson’s shameless and profiteering hypocrisy, there have been more than a few head-scratchers, and one extreme faux pas that’s almost as horrible as Adelson’s original crass remarks.

You missed it?  That’s because it was deleted about two and a half hours after first appearing over at major discussion forum TwoPlusTwo.  And the “it” in question was a thread started by Poker Players Alliance Vice President Rich Muny, asking players to work on PhotoShops depicting Adelson in unflattering ways, such as one in which a poster PShopped Adelson’s pasty mug onto the jellied body of Star Wars animavillain Jabba the Hut.

Visual proof?  Oh, yeah, there’s that:

So much fail.  So much glorious, unfettered fail.  I’ve railed against the PPA and Muny and others of its officials before, for their crass amateurism, and the PPA remains the organization that shoots itself in the foot, allows the foot to heal, then reloads the gun and starts blazing away again.

Again, this is why the organization simply cannot be trusted to be the voice of online poker in the US.

The thread quickly jumped up to at least 25 posts before it was deleted by someone who had at least a grain of common sense.  Along with four or five Muny posts and about as many PShops of Adelson, the complaints about Muny quickly began raining in.  That’s when the thing finally got nuked, and not before.  Some samples:

Locked it was, and then deleted.  Copying in the original URL for the thread now returns a simple “thread unavailable” screen.

Now, someone will ask, shouldn’t it be better off left buried?  No harm, no foul?  The answer, sadly, is no.  The PPA and Muny have both repeatedly demonstrated the ability to do gawdawful things like this, and left unchecked, it’s an absolute certainty they’ll do it again.  Despite Muny’s vehement disclaimer, it appears he really does not understand that he cannot act in this way while serving as a board member of poker’s largest lobbying group, and it’s least the fourth such atrocious lack of common sense exhibited by a higher-up of the PPA.

Muny also claimed that it was his personal account, and the opinions were his own.  My response to that silliness is, “Fine, then create an account which doesn’t have the PPA’s logo slathered all over it, and use it for your personal stuff.  And quit embarrassing the rest of us.”

You don’t get mulligans on this stuff in the court of public opinion.  A lobbyist cannot expect to have it both ways, yet the PPA keeps trying just that, and in the process they remain one of poker’s longest running embarrassments.  It’s all fail, glorious fail.

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[Update: 6/28]

We’d wondered who it was who deleted the 2+2 thread above, leaving open the small possibility that it might have been Muny himself who’d come to his senses and done the deleting.

Judging by this Twitter exchange, it wasn’t that:

To reiterate, satirical mockery is A-ok coming from the peanut gallery or the Fourth Estate.  It’s absolutely verboten for a man in Muny’s position.