Poker Players and Insults

April 30, 2009

In the news this week was a story about how Joan Rivers pitched a fit on the show “Celebrity Apprentice” when her daughter got fired for losing a challenge. Rivers focused her rage on Annie Duke, a very popular poker player, calling her names and innuendos. The World Series of Poker has a real issue with Rivers and thinks that she was out of bounds.

Rivers’ daughter Melissa lost the challenge and when she was eliminated instead of Duke, Rivers started insulting the poker player calling her “worse than white trash” because she was a poker player, and saying that her money had blood on it. She inferred that the people the poker player dealt with were criminals and that they didn’t have last names.

The World Series of Poker was quick to defend Duke’s honor saying that poker players were great people and that they were really proud of her and how well she was doing on the show. They said that her being on the show was good for the game of poker and that Rivers didn’t know what she was talking about.

Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack got his own dig back in at Rivers. When asked if he thought it would be good for poker to have a woman win the main event he said, "We would love to see a woman win the main event ... unless that woman happens to be Joan Rivers.” He said that they have already changed their rules of poker to be stricter and that there were a few things last year that they were not happy with but that all issues had been resolved.