Joe McKeehen's Angry Tirade

Last year’s WSOP Main Event winner, Joe McKeehen, has launched an astonishing attack on the media, claiming that they are responsible for the earlier start times for many of this year’s events.

The 24-year old Pennsylvanian, who took down $7,683,346 for his post-to-post victory in November, claimed that poker players “have been getting sh-t on because of the media ever since I started playing live poker.”

McKeehen took to his Twitter account to announce his disgust at the 11am start times, spewing:

He continued his verbal assault by stating that:

His tirade was met with incredulity by most players and fans of the game, Daniel Negreanu responding:

“I can tell you with absolute certainty that the media had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Negreanu said. “What do you claim to know that I don’t? I was involved internally and am telling you media had nothing at all to do with it.”;

It is “obscene to assume that media wasn't even a slight consideration,” replied McKeehen, tweeting under the namedude904, who then proceeded to involve himself in various Twitter spats with members of the poker media.

IBus Media’s Matt Parvis tweeted that, “I’ve been working the WSOP for 10 years and I, nor anyone I know, have ever ‘lobbied’ for start time changes,” and their exchange eventually saw McKeehen tweet, “cool, i'm a player, and if morons like you went away the game would be much more enjoyable for most of us.” Not too charming.

Negreanu and the majority of others’ views were supported by WSOP spokesman Seth Palansky, who explained that seven of last year’s 68 WSOP events actually began at 10am, and also refuted McKeehen’s claim that “in a city that never sleeps (Vegas) it’s going to cause many [people] to skip events.”

“The simple math shows the two hour earlier start (10 a.m. from typical 12 noon in 2015) had no issues getting players there,” Palansky told CardPlayer.com.

In addition to the official responses, posters on 2+2 were also upset by the champion’s assault, particularly as McKeehen likened the WSOP players to “slaves” when responding to RabitowitzDarrenRabbi who said, “its amazing to me that people don't understand it's a significant change.”

This provoked some expected responses from the forumites, with ‘philepistemer’ writing:

"Comparing any poker player who isn't being held in a basement by the triads to a slave is a little ****ed up,” clearly an in-joke reference to Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, while ‘BadlyBeaten’ added the burn comment: “LOL at dude who binks the ME and thinks his opinions now matter.”

The response from ‘zigi’ summed up the majority opinion, however, when he wrote: