Change to Card Player online access

I was just trying to find the link to a recent article in Card Player magazine in answer to a reader's question, when I discovered that they have completely overhauled online access.

In the good ol' days, the entire archives of C.P. were available online for free--or at least as many years back as I ever cared to look. (It was at least five.) A few months ago, they made access much clunkier and harder to get at, but if you knew pretty specifically what you were looking for, you could still find it. Recent issues were browsable using Flash.

No more. They have changed to a entirely subscription model:

http://www.cardplayer.com/digital-subscriptions

The current issue has links to individual articles, but the links just take you to the subscription sign-up page. The "archives" section shows front covers of previous issues, but with no live links.

In what I assume is just a coincidence, Shamus wrote a blog post just a few days ago about other sources of poker information moving behind pay walls, with eGamingReview and Wicked Chops' "Insider" site being the key examples. Now C.P. has joined those ranks.

Hey, it's their content and they can do with it what they please. If they think they can monetize their assets better this way, good luck with that. But I'm skeptical that they'll find a large audience willing to pay good money to see stuff they published years ago. On a handful of occasions when writing a blog post I have remembered reading something relevant in an old C.P. issue and have gone to their archives in order to quote the source accurately and link to it. But the ability to do that is not something that is sufficiently valuable to me to pay the $30 a year that they're asking.

If in the future you catch me writing something like, "I remember Matt Matros wrote about this strategy last year in Card Player, but I can't quote it exactly," well, now you'll understand why.