26 Dec 11

Interview with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz of Subject: Poker

Subject: Poker has become one of the most important sources of news in the poker world, and they've gained this level of notoriety with a very small team and in under a year. We spoke to the site's editor-in-chief, Noah Stephens Davidowitz, to find out more.

Noah Stephens-Davidowitz

If you've paid any attention to poker news in the last several months, you're probably familiar with Subject: Poker.

In case you're not, Subject: Poker is an independent source of poker news which has made an enormous name for itself in the past year by breaking many major stories ahead of much larger news sites.

Noah Stephens-Davidowitz (often known as Noah SD) is the driving force behind the website, and as editor-in-chief he is responsible for a great deal of the content produced there.

Subject: Poker has been operating since May of 2011, but considering the level of notoriety they have achieved it feels like they've been a staple of the industry forever.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to the stories they report on, not nearly enough has been given to the site itself. To help make up for this, we interviewed Noah Stephens-Davidowitz and learned more about himself and Subject: Poker.

PokerStrategy.com: Most of our readers have probably seen your work but don't really know who you are - can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Noah SD: First and foremost, I'm a nerd. That's probably pretty clear to the poker world by now. Outside of the poker world, I'm just some guy who lives in New York. I went to Brown University as an undergrad, where I majored in math, and I'm currently applying to computer science PhD programs.

I'm a big fan of rollercoasters, tasting menus, Kurt Vonnegut, Wikipedia, Quentin Tarantino, and karaoke. In person, I'm much more talkative, sarcastic, and spontaneous than my online persona suggests. As my answer illustrates, I'm very verbose. Apologies in advance for the long-winded answers.

"My biggest accomplishment in the poker world"

PokerStrategy.com: How did you initially get involved in the online poker world? When did that involvement escalate to forum moderating, dispute settling, and running an independent news site?

Noah SD: I got into the poker world for the standard boring reason: I enjoyed playing the game with my friends (starting with regular $5 games my junior year of high school in my buddy Max's basement), became mildly obsessed, realized that I could make money at it, and then proceeded to do that for a while.

My story is slightly different in that from the beginning I was much more interested in studying the game than playing. It took me a while to actually convince myself that it was a good idea to sit down and eight-table for a few hours every day, and even after I learned that, I put in much less volume than most.

In the spring of 2010, there were pretty serious suspicions that Nick "stoxtrader" Grudzien had cheated on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, but both sites had cleared him of any wrongdoing. I didn't like the idea of an innocent man being accused of cheating or a cheater being allowed to continue playing, so I looked into it. It was a thoroughly miserable experience as I was paranoid about coming to the wrong conclusion, but after about four weeks of research, I was quite confident that he'd cheated.

I made the story public, and suddenly I became the guy that people contacted when they suspected cheating or needed a dispute resolved. All of the issues that people brought up seemed really important to me, so I did my best to help out, catching a lot of cheaters in the process.

A bit later on, Cake's encryption debacle came to light, and after I was pretty relentlessly critical of their handling of it, they actually decided to hire Thomas Bakker and I to help figure out what had happened. That led to the largest independent security audit of a poker site ever conducted. I think that's probably my biggest accomplishment in the poker world, though since we found that it was very unlikely that any cheating occurred, not many people know about it and even fewer care.

"I care a ridiculous amount about the online poker community"

PokerStrategy.com: What inspired you to launch Subject: Poker?

Noah SD: Subject: Poker was Thomas Bakker's idea, although we'd both been discussing something like it for a while. It was clear to me (and everyone else I spoke to about it) that the established poker media was completely incapable of reporting on serious issues. A year ago, that didn't seem like that big of a deal because serious issues on a scale large enough to require a real article were rare. The poker community was pretty terribly informed about some issues, but it didn't seem like a crisis or anything because there wasn't too much that they really had to know.

Then, Black Friday happened. Suddenly there was really big important news fairly regularly and nobody reporting on it decently. Thomas suggested the idea to me, and I thought it was awesome. I care a ridiculous amount about the online poker community, and I was very frustrated watching them struggle to digest what was going on in the face of a ton of misinformation.

I was already spending a ton of time on 2p2 trying to help out, so starting our own site just seemed natural. I think it was also just an opportunity to do something fairly big, to do it ourselves, and to do it right. The idea grew really quickly because we're both very particular, and we didn't want to half-ass it. I was finishing up the final project for a class at the time, so we didn't really start on the site until about a month after Black Friday.

"People's lives depend on this world"

PokerStrategy.com: What were your initial goals when you launched the site? Do you feel you've achieved them?

Noah SD: We wanted to keep the poker community informed about things that are important to them. People's lives depend on this world, and we wanted to keep them well-informed so that they could make better decisions and live better lives. That's all, really. Maybe we also thought it would be fun or something. Subject: Poker has done much more than I expected it to.

I initially anticipated a lot of good analysis of publicly available information, clarification of confusion, etc; I thought we'd get some pretty solid readership -maybe 500 hits per day when we had a story up, mostly from nerds like me. Instead, we ended up doing a ton of investigative reporting, and in turn we managed to break loads of really important stories that likely would not have come out without us, and our readership has been amazing.

"I made a promise, and I keep my promises"

PokerStrategy.com: Subject: Poker is entirely independent and has vowed to stay that way. Why is independence so important to the site?

Subject: Poker's Logo

Noah SD: Frankly, I don't know that it is. When I founded the site, I was very concerned that our readership would perceive us as having a bias if we took ads from poker sites. This is because most poker media outlets take ads from poker sites, and they're all blatantly biased in their advertisers' favor.

I anticipated a lot of our articles being quite critical of poker sites (who deserve a lot of criticism), and I didn't want anyone thinking that our advertisers had any influence over our content. So, we made a promise from the beginning that we would remain independent.

As it turns out, lots of people think we're biased anyway. The site's comments and Two Plus Two have seen plenty of accusations that we're in someone's pocket, and some other poker media outlets have even devoted whole articles to discussing some imagined sinister motivations that they think I have. I don't know if that problem would have been worse if we were an affiliate, but I expect that it wouldn't. I certainly know that I would not have changed our content if I had been accepting affiliate money.

Nonetheless, I made a promise when I started S:P not to take ad revenue from poker sites. Keeping that promise has obviously cost me a ton of money, and more importantly, it has meant that we can't pay our writers anything close to a reasonable amount for their time, which bothers me (especially considering the amazing amount of time and effort that Diamond Flush has put into this project).

It may be the case that people would not have taken us as seriously if we had been an affiliate... who knows? Regardless, I made a promise, and I keep my promises.

"UB has received far too little attention"

PokerStrategy.com: Have there been any particular news stories that made you especially proud of the site?

Noah SD: A lot of them. I'm quite proud of my original story about the e-check "shortfall" (I now really regret using that term, though). I think that was when most of our readership started to understand for the first time just how carelessly Full Tilt was run and, in particular, how lax they had been with our money.

There was also the fact that UB had only about $5.5M available and owed $54M, which we published in June. I think that story helped a lot of people realize that the situation at Cereus was quite dire, and I hope that they planned their lives accordingly.

Brian Horton's story about FTP's dispute with Moneybookers, which came out a couple days before Full Tilt's license was suspended, was remarkably prescient and the first real direct evidence that the money wasn't actually there.

Additionally, Diamond Flush has done some amazing work recently. She broke the Tapie story on September 21st, way before anyone knew anything close to that specific about FTP's negotiations with buyers. She's gone on to keep the poker community extremely well-informed about the negotiations, which is really a herculean task considering that all parties involved don't want much information to be public. She's also had the rare privilege to report on some good news, which is nice.


PokerStrategy.com: Are there any topics in the poker world that you think deserve more attention than they have been getting?

Noah SD: The situation with UB has received far too little attention after FTP really hogged the spotlight. They owe players a lot of money too, and it's unfortunate.

"The most demanding part of running S:P"

PokerStrategy.com: A lot of the poker world wonders how you get so much high-quality information. Can you divulge anything about your sources?

Noah SD: I certainly won't divulge any specific sources who have asked me not to reveal their names, but the typical anonymous source comes to us because he has information that he thinks people have a right to know. Many of them are risking their reputations and their financial futures by talking to us; some of them are breaking the law. They know that.

It's really remarkable that so many people are willing to take that risk just to help out strangers. We definitely don't make their lives any easier, since we're extremely skeptical of our sources. I definitely didn't expect this, and the complexity of dealing with anonymous sources, vetting their information without giving them away, and keeping them safe is by far the most demanding part of running S:P.


PokerStrategy.com: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. We greatly appreciate all of the hard work that you do, and we wish both you and Subject: Poker the best of luck in the future!

If you enjoyed this interview, you may also want to check out our interview with Michael & Nick from Pokerfuse.com, another independent source of poker news.

by Matt Kaufman