Weird Tales I: The Championship That Is... or Isn't

In the early days of the year a press release arrived on the web, courtesy of an unknown (at least to me) outfit called HeadsUp Entertainment, Inc. The release, which you'd probably find only if you were actively searching for such things, touted the upcoming 2008 Canadian Open Poker Championship, purportedly to be held in March at the Deerfoot Inn and Casino in Calgary, Alberta.

Good enough. The holidays always suck for real news and it's the right time for minor stories such as this to have a chance to be published. And published it was, on several poker sites.

And then it was de-published, if you know what I mean. Word came through the various pipelines that these stories were incorrect, and that no date had been announced. I found that to be a bit strange, because I rarely accept any press release at face value, and just in the way of researching the thing I uncovered the host site at canadianchampionshippoker.com, which includes a complete schedule of events and remains intact even as we speak.

Here's a screen grab from the main page, just to convince y'all that I haven't yet gone completely insane:



--- source: canadianchampionshippoker.com

Which made the retraction of the press release, well... weird. That's the theme of the night, anyway. Why bother to issue a release, and then retract it, if you're going to leave up the original site anyway, with all information intact? Earth here, calling Canadian Open Poker Championship: There are things called 'spiders' that are used by Google and Yahoo! and every search engine on the Web, and they've certainly found and archived your site by now. Umm, if it's wrong, take down the whole thing, rather than just disappearing a press release that didn't seem to be wrong in the first place.

Not that I was planning on attending, anyway. Calgary in March is not what I would call a preferred destination.

By the way, the site greets you with a music video that was a promo for the Stampede Classic held at the same casino. Guy sings like a Mel Torme wannabe, except that Torme's dead. Instead of the 'Velvet Fog', maybe this guy can be the 'Banff Blizzard'. Maybe he's somebody famous. Maybe he's somebody good. He can sing better than me, at least... but I'm pretty sure I won't be buying his CDs.