Ed Miller's Website Changes and Mason Malmuth

Recently, there have been some changes at Ed Miller's blog. He's disabled viewing of his archive posts. Anything older than 30 days isn't viewable. Supposedly, in the future those blog posts will be available for viewing, but only at a fee.

(This fan is doubtful that will come to fruition, but only time will tell.)

There have been a number of rumors about why these changes have occurred. The rumors are all over the board, including suspicions of CardPlayer magazine, the IRS, Miller's wife Elaine, and others, but recently the truth has come out.

Matt Flynn wrote:

Mason wanted Ed Miller to stop putting content on NPA. The reason given was he thinks high-quality searchable internet content will kill book sales. He pressured stoxpoker to get Ed to make his site less available. Ed did so. Mason then asked us PNL authors to drop the contract. We did not do so. There ya go.

And then Miller wrote this on his forums:

What Matt Flynn said in this thread is true. Mason Malmuth is the one who has been trying to force changes here at NPA. It started in about September of last year, and it's gone from an initial demand that I shut the website down entirely to a letter from his lawyer demanding that I remove all articles older than 3 months to threats of breaking deals with Stoxpoker if they couldn't convince me to alter the site.

I struck a deal with Stoxpoker designed to appease Mason and keep him off Stoxpoker's back. I'm not sure it's the right thing for Stoxpoker, and I'm not sure I did the right thing either.

This NPA stuff is just the tip of the iceberg with Mason. He's been pressuring, harrassing, and smearing me and the people I work with (Matt Flynn, Sunny Mehta, the Stoxpoker guys) for nearly two years now. He says it's about book sales or this or that, but there's no doubt in my mind that his main motivation is purely personal. He's trying to “get” me any way he can think of.

I hate this kind of stuff. I just want to talk about poker. My original strategy was to keep doing my thing and not to dignify Mason's nonsense with a response, but it's pretty clear now that Mason is going to keep pushing and pushing until I can't ignore him anymore. I should have nipped it in the bud, but I didn't, and now we'll see where it goes from here.

So, sounds like Mason Malmuth is behind all this. It's not Miller being greedy, it's not the IRS on his back, it's not CardPlayer magazine claiming rights to Ed's writing, it's Mason Malmuth being a control freak.

Can't say it comes as a surprise.