Slides, Celebs, and Likes

Been in the Bahamas for more than a week now, having left the farm just a day before the Great Snowstorm of 2017 hit to cover the place with eight inches of the white stuff. Vera and our four-legged friends all managed okay, though I felt more than a little guilty not being around to help deal with it all.

Quite a contrast down here, weather-wise, as you might imagine, with temps in the mid-to-upper 70s, the cloudless skies baby blue, and the water an even darker, more brilliant shade of blue. It’s been busy, but I did manage to goof around on the water slides on two separate occasions already, including daring to plunge down “The Abyss.” It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s still long enough for all manner of existential doubt to overwhelm a dude before splash landing at the bottom.

The PokerStars Championship Bahamas festival is now heading into its home stretch, with the High Roller and Main Event both ending tomorrow. The poker’s been fun to follow, as I was on the $100K Super High Roller to start, then the Main Event, and now the $25K HR.

That first event saw the actor-comedian Kevin Hart take part, livening things up quite a lot for the first day-and-a-half before he finally busted a second time. Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame then played in the Main, so there was a lot of star-gazing going on between those two.

Speaking of poker-playing actors, Jennifer Tilly is here, too, and in fact took runner-up in a $5K turbo event this week, one where the final table included David Peters, Benjamin Pollak, and Mustapha Kanit.

I’d met her before but finally had a chance to talk with her a bit more this week. She’s a great follow on Twitter by the way -- @Jtillathekilla2 -- and one of the things we talked about were the folks we follow on there.

I also confessed to her that I never have gotten in the habit of favoriting tweets. I’ll retweet ones I like occasionally, but I just never got around to start “liking” them. For example, I liked one she sent a few days ago sagely observing: “Poker tournaments are like life: We're all gonna die, just some of us last longer than others.” But I just had to tell her I liked it as I didn’t “like” it on Twitter. (She assured me that was fine.)

(That reminded me of something similar I’ve been known to utter around poker tournaments.)

Vera kids me about not “liking” tweets. I’ll tweet something and get a bunch of likes, then mention it to her. “And how does that make you feel?” she asks with a grin.

“I like it,” I reply.

One more day of poker tomorrow and then back home to the horses where the snow has already melted. There’s a pic to the left from the day after that I tweeted before. It’s totally okay if you didn’t favorite it.

The Cube Debut

Tuned in to some of that first “Summer Series” heads-up match of the Global Poker League featuring the debut of the much-advertised “cube.” Not really eager to do a big, comprehensive review of every little detail of the sucker, but I did want to share just one initial impression.

After eight weeks’ worth of online matches -- all of it streamed live and archived on the GPL twitch channel (whatzit, 200 hours? more?) -- the league took a week off, then cranked back up yesterday with live heads-up matches taking place inside the large glass box. Celebrity player Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame was pitted against Fabrice Soulier for the first best-of-three match, in prime time no less.

Was curious to see some of the comments both on Twitch and Twitter as the sucker played out. On Twitch came a lot of head-scratching, with viewers who’d wandered over from other channels rightly wondering if they were watching some kind of new game show. Which they were, I guess, with the sparse set, fluorescent glow, and ambient music evoking that sort of vibe. (More so than a sporting one, which had been the talk back when the cube was first announced.)

On Twitter the comments were less frequent and more informed, with the occasional snark (“Not sure what to think about 2 guys standing in an aquarium clicking buttons,” said LivePokerPro) tending to stand out.

Laughed at Change100’s comment estimating the lighting as being “somewhere between spin class and tanning bed.” Dr. Pauly’s questions “When do they flood the cube? Or release the snakes?” earned a grin. And Haley Hintze’s idea that “the walls should slooowly move in to crusssssshh the players” was rightly inspired by the evil-villain’s-lair look of it all.

It looked different, that’s for sure. But then I realized -- it looked familiar, too. It was live poker, made to resemble an online game.

The players’ hands are shown on tablets, with a screen in the middle displaying hole cards and chips, timers, blinds/antes, and everything else also recorded on screens. In other words, there are no chips, no cards, and no dealer. The players stand as well, which produces some novel-seeming types of non-verbal communication, and probably affects the talk, too.

But it all adds up to a strange approximation of “live-ish” online poker -- like the players were standing and walking and talking inside a big computer monitor. That’s what inspired my one cheeky contribution to last night’s banter: “The player-sims are incredibly lifelike.”

They’ve got six weeks’ worth of “Summer Series” heats lined up. Guess we’ll see how things are standing after that (pun intended).

Image: Global Poker League