Like most all sane, rational poker players, I had enough of Will ‘Assoof’ Kassouf’s antics when he made a complete and total ass of himself at the 2016 WSOP.
Well, (un)lucky for us, he returned to center stage – literally – for the 2025 WSOP Main Event, and the assigned poker media turned his bizarre rantings into an embarrassing chase for clicks, for attention, and to see who could race fastest to the bottom of the media barrel.
Yeah, I come from the era of, “If it bleeds, it leads,” when it comes to writing news articles. Today’s media lives by the, “If it screams, it streams,” motto, and poker media entities foamed at their collective keyboards to chase each humiliating mouthful of word salad Kassouf spewed into the WSOP’s poker tournament arenas.
This WSOP Main Event was a media challenge, with four different entities vying for eyeballs, for clicks, for attention. The WSOP hired its own team to post items to the WSOP+ App (the App itself was a fantastic addition, the content not so much), mostly copying and pasting updates produced by the Poker News live updates team. Along with WSOP and PN, PokerOrg has its own team doing its own version of live coverage, along with full updates on the $25k Fantasy offering. Add to that the PokerGO stream teams producing final table coverage and daily Main Event streams.
Four media entities, all craving attention. Once Kassouf arrived, they all pandered to him being the lowest common denominator and he dominated all the coverage, much to the loss of every decent poker fan. With fewer than 300 players left in the 2025 WSOP Main Event, the above-mentioned poker media posted more than 20 pieces of social media content JUST about Kassouf in a single day, no other player mentioned more than once.
We’re better than this (aren’t we?), can’t we tell good stories without Chasing the Kardashians 24/7/365? As disgusted as I am seeing how the coverage went, I understand where its drive comes from. “If it bleeds, it leads,” refers to writing newspaper articles and focusing on the car crashes and shootings over the ‘feel-good’ stories readers loud and clear said they wanted … only to show it was NOT what they read.
One of the first strong online presences for newspapers was one I oversaw and operated in the early 2000’s, receiving the award for the best non-daily newspaper website in the US during my time there (sick brag, bro). This was when analytics was in its infancy, but its reality jabbed swords into the egos of reporters everywhere. Math don’t lie, folks, and it didn’t lie here. On average, 87 percent of the most-read article each month came from the ‘Crime and Courts’ section, where we wrote about car crashes, bank robberies, shootings and deaths .. aka ‘if it bleeds, it leads.”
So yeah, I don’t have to like the truth to accept it, I know WHY some reporters were forced by editors to abandon their ethics and morals and grovel at Kassouf’s feet. I take issue with those who reveled in groveling. Be better, damnit.
(PokerNews photo by Austin Carrington)
About The Author
