Anatomy of an Asshole: The Josh Arieh Compendium

READ MORE: Iggy, Josh Arieh, Party Poker Blog, WSOP 2004

It’s unfortunate when other blogs cover Josh Arieh. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. Especially when they do such an exhaustive profile. But for those of you curious about the ascent of the Cinnabon—as we are, natch—check out Iggy’s revisitation of our favorite chubbed-out poker player. This is the Infinite Jest of poker blog posts, but well worth it. The post includes e-mails from Erick Lindgren, Daniel Negreanu, Paul Phillips, et al commenting about Ariehs’ infamous WSOP 2004 outbursts. An excerpt from Negreanu’s letter:

I

consider Josh a friend but the purpose of this post isn’t to defend his behaviour during the WSOP broadcast. Anybody who watched it, INCLUDING Josh knows that he was out of line on a few occassions.

The reason for this post is to illustrate how much power we (the players) give over to the people putting on a show when we sign those release forms. Basically, once we sign those papers they can tell any story they want to tell, and they can tell it any way they feel with get the best ratings. Hey, I can’t say I blame them.

What I can say is that it was pretty clear to me that they took those few bits (where Josh was out of line) and summed up his character based on those actions.

For example, there was one clip where they focused in on Josh looking flustered by Matt Dean’s call with JJ. Josh was just looking over at Erick like, “What the?” He wasn’t saying anything to Matt, he wasn’t going off on him or anything like that, but they used that shot to make Josh look even worse.

Iggy’s Arieh Post [Party Poker Blog]