The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, Episode 16: Burns and Allen

A new installment of The Hard-Boiled Radio Show has been posted over on the show’s blog. This one primarily features an old episode of The Burns and Allen Show, starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. This particular show, called “The Poker Game,” is from 1944 and guest stars Alan Ladd. You can trip over to the show’s blog to get it, or just get to it here.

I was having some trouble over in iTunes the last couple of weeks after having done as instructed and allowed the Google blob to devour my Feedburner account. Some of the more recent shows weren’t turning up over in iTunes once I’d done that, but all 16 HBPRS episodes are now back. So if yr an iTunes sort of person, you can subscribe to the show or download eps over there just fine.

For those who haven’t heard the podcast before, it is a little different from most poker podcasts. No news of the day or interviews with current poker celebs. Rather, the show mainly focuses on storytelling, with the stories usually having something to do with poker or at least gambling.

Many of the shows feature excerpts being read (and sometimes even dramatized a little) from works of fiction or nonfiction. I’ll have guests on occasionally to tell their stories or make other contributions. Sometimes I’ll throw a poker-themed song in there. And every Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show contains a “feature presentation” -- namely, a full-length episode of an old time radio show. Most of these come from the 1940s and 1950s, and I’ll go back and forth between dramas, detective-type mysteries, horror, and comedy.

One other thing about the podcast -- since none of the shows feature current news topics, they aren’t particularly “time-bound,” meaning you can go back and listen to old ones (or listen to them out of order) and they’ll still make sense and (hopefully) be as entertaining as when they were first posted. Here are links to all 16 entries for episodes over on the show’s blog, each with show notes giving you an idea what you’ll find once you download a show:

1. Dead Man’s Deal
2. The Killer Cards
3. Duffy’s Tavern
4. Hitchhike Poker
5. Aces and Eights
6. The Ambassador of Poker
7. Fibber McGee and Molly
8. Aces and Eights
9. The Case of the Poker Murders
10. Come, Fill My Cup
11. Poker Chip Draw
12. Gunsmoke, The Gambler
13. The Life of Riley
14. The Hot Hundred Grand Caper
15. The Lacework Kid
16. Burns and Allen

All feedback is welcome. And suggestions, too, for future shows. Send that stuff to shamus at hardboiledpoker dot com. Probably won’t be doing another new one until after the World Series of Poker is done, but I might try to do a couple of short interviews or something like that while I’m here to include in future episodes.

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Gonna come back on here in a little while with a regular WSOP post, but I wanted to announce the new podcast and also note how this here entry makes a total of 800 posts on Hard-Boiled Poker. As I’ve said before on these here centennial posts, that’s a damn lot of scribblin’! Thanks as always for comin’ back.

And I’ll be comin’ back here shortly to talk about yesterday a bit and look forward to today, when I finally get back to work helping cover the WSOP for PokerNews. Looks like they couldn’t quite finish that Event No. 4 (the “Stimulus Special”) after all, so if I'm not mistaken it appears there really will be seven different events going on during the course of the day-slash-night-slash-morning. Yikes.