It must be the silly season - Golden Palace buying old toasted sandwiches,
Sunny bidding for baseball teams and now Poker Room.com offering
to stage a poker game to resolve a national hockey dispute....
The press release from the Scandinavian company trumpets that in an
effort to find a solution to salvage the 2004/2005 NHL hockey season
PokerRoom.com this week offered its online services to NHL commissioner,
Gary Bettman's New York office and NHL Players' Association (NHLPA)
executive director Bob Goodenow's Toronto office, inviting them to
settle a longstanding labor dispute like men - in a game of winner-take-all
poker on PokerRoom.com.
In the spirit of their respective bargaining positions, the two-stage
online tournament will feature a game of limit Texas Hold'em poker
with a cap of four raises, followed by a heads-up, one-on-one game
of no-limit Texas Hold'em. The first player to capture all his opponent's
chips wins the challenge and the season is saved.
"Hockey fans in North America have had enough of the current
high-stakes game of brinkmanship that led to and continues to disrupt
the 2004-2005 NHL hockey season," says Patrik Selin, casino boss,
PokerRoom.com. "If they can't resolve this dispute through
traditional negotiations and compromise, then the PokerRoom.com tournament
offers them the best, and quickest, way to declare a winner and let
the fans enjoy hockey again before it's too late. With no downloads
required to play and the tournament hosted on-line, Mr. Bettman and
Mr. Goodenow can easily take on the challenge from their respective
offices in New York and Toronto."
The marketing kicker comes in the final paragraph of the release.
If Mr. Bettman and Mr. Goodenow decide not to accept this challenge,
and the season is lost, PokerRoom.com invites hockey fans across the
country to participate in the next best thing: PokerRoom Night in
Canada online tournaments. A perfect replacement to fill the Saturday
night void, these tournaments run every Saturday night at 7:00 p.m.
EST until February 19, with a final tournament on February 26.
The winner of the weekly PokerRoom Night in Canada tournaments will
receive a ticket which entitles them to a seat in the PokerRoom Night
in Canada Play-off Final on the 26th. This final tournament will be
hosted as a single table, winner-takes-all-tournament, where the lucky
player wins an all-expense paid trip to Sweden to see popular NHL
stars actually play a game of hockey.