Muck Corp confirmed Monday that it has acquired Costanza Poker in full, and will relaunch the site under the name Muck Poker. The filing was one paragraph long and included no purchase price, no timeline and no explanation of who at Muck Corp actually made the call.
That last part turned out to be the interesting one. Muck Corp is run by a six-person executive team with no CEO, a structure the company has described elsewhere as deliberately unresolved. Three of the six say they voted yes. Two say they were in the room but do not recall a vote being taken. The sixth, Larry, was not asked, a detail he confirmed himself, unprompted, twice.
The Details
Bill, who appointed himself Chief Strategy Officer several months ago in a meeting he also called, told staff the rebrand was basically finished before any actual rebranding had occurred. Sign installers arrived at Costanza's offices the same afternoon. They removed the old sign, discovered the new one had not shipped yet, and left the wall bare for six hours rather than risk putting the old one back up and having to take it down again.
Costanza Poker's own staff learned about the sale from the sign installers, not from Muck Corp. Nobody there disputes that the sale happened, only that anyone told them first. One employee, asked whether the culture would change under new ownership, pointed out that the felt on the poker table in the lobby has not been replaced since the site launched, and neither has anything else, so probably not.
The two characters who have appeared on Costanza's own marketing for years, a confident player holding a strong hand and a resigned one across the table from him, were reportedly still at the table when the sign came down. Neither one moved. A staffer described it as the calmest anyone has been about any of this, a line Muck Corp has since put on an internal poster without asking first.
Rival poker sites mostly treated the news as a scheduling problem. One competitor's marketing team sent a congratulatory message to the wrong company twice before finding the right one, three hours apart. A second competitor asked Muck Corp's press office for comment and received, forwarded without a note, the same one-paragraph filing that started this whole thing.
What Happens Next
Muck Poker is expected to launch publicly once all six executives can agree on a date, a bar the company has cleared zero times this quarter. A coming soon placeholder has already gone up on the site, which several employees noted is the first thing Muck Corp has shipped on schedule all year.
Asked for comment, Muck Corp's press office referred questions to Muck Corp's press office.
Nothing about this happened. Muck Corp is not a real company, and Costanza Poker has not been acquired by anyone. Muck Poker is a real project from the same team behind The Muck, and is expected to launch soon.
