Go ahead and ask

laziness and arrogance

moderators, in general stayed on as volunteers for as long as they wanted. when I suspected the position wasn't fun I would start encouraging people to resign.

why is it that forums rarely recognize whenever moderators are taking things too far and are ruining the environment

I'd be curious of your estimate of what % of Dave's lifetime earnings came directly from P&L playing cards (all types).

Hi Mat, condolences and best wishes during a very difficult time at the end a very long difficult time.

I am posting this because you started this thread—I was going to reply you to in the RIP thread but then thought better of it. I’m not sure why I feel the need to post it but here it is.

My parents divorced in 1970, my mother moved backed to her home state, and I had minimal contact with my father (his choice) until his death in 1982.

I finally got sober in 2024. At some point I had a dream where he asked me to forgive him, I said yes and meant it and still do, and woke up feeling good about it. I still haven’t forgotten of course.

FWIW your father’s books were a great positive in my life, and the one brief interaction I had with him was pleasant.

I think I speak for many here in hoping you will check in occasionally in this thread when convenient and let us know how you’re doing.

Please take care.

BTW this is something I wrote in a family chat, nobody will miss a thing by ignoring it.

Spoiler

Show

Do you know why Ric Flair showed up to that event and Rajon Rondo didn’t?

Unsurprisingly people are talking about this outside of this thread. I'll second what someone else said, "Nothing more noble than driving a bus".

Did David Sklansky like any movies, books or art? Any favorites that you know of?

Be kind, rewind.

Also, there is a copy of this VHS tape for sale on Ebay right now for $16 OBO +$5.45 shipping for anyone interested. Obv not my sale, I was curious what a copy of this might be selling for and found it.

hi mat. im sorry for your loss.

i don't mean to pry one bit, and am not offended if you choose to ignore.

david wrote a little bit, i think in his book DUCY, about his childhood. he mentioned how each night his father, a mathematician, prepared a math problem for him. he shared a couple of them, they were outside the box questions, and i believe david credited his father for his own aptitude in math.

i am 100% honestly curious what growing up with David Sklansky was like. how he was as a father to you, in whatever capacity you are comfortable describing.

was there a first time, or a special time, that you realized he was unusually smart?

What exactly happened with his January domestic battery issue? Who did he attack under whatever circumstances, how did he attack them, and why?

How much time did he and Mason spend with each other outside of poker book stuff?

He supported himself with cards into the nineties. But once he made money from books and this website, I don't think he ever played seriously again.

He wasn't too into fiction. But he liked Jerzy Kosinski.

I wasn't there, but it was mostly a misunderstanding. He had checked himself out of the hospital AMA and was barely functioning physically or mentally. I think he was thrashing around and accidentally hit her. She did not want him arrested. I don't know more beyond that. He was never a violent person. I'm confident about that

David and Mason spent virtually no time together that wasn't involving business.

I didn't grow up with him. He and my mother divorced when I was a baby. I saw him a few times a year and we did stuff like go carts and movies. There wasn't much of a real relationship.

I'm going to follow up on this. I believe that all the accusations, mostly by nasty people, were not correct. For some reason, David hated being in the hospital even though he needed their help. And what would happen is that as soon as he could, he would check himself out of the hospital and go home where his health/mental issues would return.

The person, in my opinion, who wrote the Poker News article, was probably looking for a good story where in reality there was nothing to write about. This was obviously true the next day when all charges were dropped.

While we were friends, our relationship was mostly professional. We did spend a lot of time together working on books, and at times David would help with comments of books written by other authors, but socially we did very little together.

Mat, I can’t imagine how difficult and disorienting this moment must be.

We’ve never interacted, and my only exposure to your father was through his posts here, but I hope this thread is actually helping you in the way you intended. If it is, that’s what matters. If it ever stops feeling that way, nobody reasonable would think twice about you stepping back or closing it.

You’re being very open in a space that hasn’t always been kind to that, and with an audience that includes some anonymous and unhinged people. Just make sure it’s serving you, not the audience.

Wishing you some steadiness through all of this.

As an admin, are you privy to the financial details of the site and is that something now that it's under new management and they aren't running ads you feel comfortable disclosing? It's something that's always been wildly speculated upon. I've seen estimates as high 2 million a year in ad revenue. Do you know and/or feel comfortable stating what this site brought in for revenue during it's peak and after the peak leading up to the sale?

It's always been Two Plus Two policy not to make specific statements on how much we made or exactly what someone's royalty rate was because many people were involved, whether it was this website or the publishing side, and we felt that at least some of those people would want to keep this information private. I will say that our policy was to pay our people at a much higher rate than what our competitors did (and this was a source of friction between us and one particular competitor who accused us of lying about what we actually paid out).

I will say that whether it was this website or the publishing business, our degree of success was much more than we originally thought was possible (and yes the poker boom probably had something to do with that). Also, when it comes to this website, we had no advertising revenue until the fourth year which was 2001.

oh yeah, i get that

but just to clarify, i was only asking about the website side

the reason is that whatever the site was making or not making got tied into a lot of narratives around david specifically

and to be fair, a big part of that whole situation only exists because he chose to post those things himself. if he never made those threads and just kept that part of his life private, none of it ever becomes a public narrative in the first place. maybe there’s some rumors, but nothing close to what it became

instead, you end up with a situation where years later people can just pull directly from his own posts as source material, and build entire narratives off of that. if those threads don’t exist, or get wiped early, none of it scales the same way or persists like it has

which is what makes it kind of ironic. a lot of the backlash toward him was driven by his own disclosures, on a platform he had ownership in

that’s where the speculation comes from. people connect those dots and assume there must have been some financial incentive behind letting those threads live and spread

i don’t really buy that myself. it’s hard to see how a handful of threads about sue, brandi, or saura would meaningfully move the needle financially

but it does get repeated a lot, especially by people trying to frame intent

so i was mostly asking to understand whether there’s any reality to that at all, or if it’s just something people ran with over time

The way I understand that it works is that there is a dual copyright on any post. This means that a poster is free to use his posts in anyway that he wants.

If an author or someone who received revenue from this website wants to release information about what they made, that's their business. Also, I will say this, David's ownership in this website was small. In addition, what someone made from this website was determined by contracts and not by ownership percentage.

I'm not sure exactly what threads you're referring to but our legal advice was to allow threads/posts to stay up as much as possible unless there was something clearly wrong with them (and we had plenty of those).

In my opinion, David was obviously stupid to post some of the stuff that he did. But he felt that if others would hear his explanation then what happened would make more sense to them. Also, I think we had over 60 million posts, and that's what drove the website.

David had downloaded the pokersesh interview I did of him like 9 years ago. Can you repost that if it exists. Masons too. Both were epic but ballys deleted them on accident after the live at the bike sale to Ballys.

Knowing David's acumen on computers, I highly doubt he downloaded it without Sue's help. If it exists it would be on his computer. Hopefully Sue has access to it.

Mason,

Not sure how much you’re joining Mat’s AMA thread, but two questions for you if you’re open.

Was there ever a poker or gambling related book you and/or David wanted to put out, but that never got made for some reason? Basically is there a lost 2+2 book out there?

Have you ever considered documenting a history of 2+2 in book, podcast, or other form? From formation, through the poker boom, tying together the books and publishing with the forums. Theres probably a decent tale in there somewhere for someone to piece together.

Mason taking over someone else’s AMA is remarkably on brand

I asked Mason to participate.