The Global Poker League’s First Finale (Finally)

The Global Poker League’s first season is finally coming to an end with their playoffs running this week in “the Cube” in Las Vegas.

Way back when this first season of the GPL got going back in late March, the plan then was apparently to stage this finale at the SSE Arena, Wembley where (presumably) there’d be a big live audience on hand to watch it all.

There were a lot of particulars having to do with this first season that hadn’t been pinned down then, actually, and at the time I think most were a little skeptical that there actually would be some sort of season-punctuating event attended by thousands.

In May came news that the playoffs would be starting in late September-early October and be played at the TwitchCon 2016 event in San Diego, then finished up at Wembley in November. That plan was eventually scrapped, then in early August we heard the playoffs would be happening this week in a Las Vegas studio.

So it’s a decidedly less spectacular spectacle, but still all being streamed live on Twitch for those who are curious. Yesterday the sucker went on for more than 15 hours before the Montreal Nationals emerged as the Americas Conference champs.

I tuned in occasionally, and will probably do so again today as the Eurasia Conference gets decided, then tomorrow for the championship. It remains kind of a challenging watch for more than short stretches. Still, I’m glad to see them managing to see this first season through, and there something kind of entertaining about the playoff format.

Have to imagine Season 2 will be scaled back considerably, though, the eight-month grind (with the breaks) being a bit too lengthy to keep the attention of most. There remains all sorts of challenges, really, making it hard to imagine poker working as a genuine spectator sport, sans the “reality TV”-type bells and whistles that has made it work in other formats and incarnations.

Image: Global Poker League.

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

GPL Moves Into Third Week

Was busy for much of yesterday although by late afternoon I was able to switch on the Global Poker League and watch the 6-max matches go by.

They’ve now introduced webcams for those (a couple of players at a time) as well as some “postgame” interviews with players, all of which adds considerably to what would otherwise be a fairly dry watch of an online sit-n-go. I also feel like there’s something genuinely interesting -- and perhaps even unique -- when it comes to the players’ attempts at analyzing hands on the fly.

I’ve never much gotten into watching the single-player streams on Twitch in which a player tries to do what he or she can to engage an audience, and perhaps offer some strategy advice along the way. Many of those often seem to be “about” cheering for a player to go deeper in a tournament or build a stack on a cash table, which can be interesting if you care about the player but otherwise is not terribly compelling.

Meanwhile on the GPL streams players are perhaps in a bit more vulnerable position when it comes to offering on-the-fly analysis. For one thing, viewers can see everyone’s hole cards (whereas the player obviously cannot), a big distinction from the Twitch streams in which those watching can only see the channel host’s cards. Thus we hear the player talking through decisions knowing whether or not his or her reads of others’ ranges are accurate, which in turn gives us a better idea how such decision-making works (or doesn’t).

I think also there’s much less of an “us-versus-them” feel to the GPL streams as opposed to other poker streams on Twitch. Sure, we might well have a rooting interest, and curiosity about outcomes and who wins and who loses also obviously motivates a person to watch. But I’m finding my attention shifting a lot as I follow the different players’ thoughts about the hands their playing, occasionally expressed by multiple players within the same hand.

The last couple of matches today (involving the “Americas Conference”) were fun, too, thanks in part to Tyler Kenney (Bryn’s brother) and Felipe “Mojave” Ramos both getting to heads-up and splitting the victories.

Both players were “wild cards” added to their respective teams (the New York Rounders for Kenney and the São Paulo Metropolitans for Ramos), and both were clearly very excited to do well in their GPL debuts. They both tended toward the “fit-or-fold” style of play (as noted by commentator Sam Grafton along the way), which I think many of us who consider ourselves recreational players also often employ, adding perhaps another layer of interest to following their progress.

The excitement level varies quite a bit, of course, with these GPL shows, and I’ll admit during certain stretches finding myself wandering away when it fails to engage. But I do think there’s something genuinely different about the shows compared to other poker TV, and so for now -- while the novelty remains fresh, anyway -- I’m continuing to dial them up.

Image: Global Poker League.

GPL Week 1 Provides Fun, Instruction

Just a quick follow-up today to Wednesday’s post in which I shared some initial impressions from the first day of the Global Poker League Week 1 shows.

Have to admit I very much enjoyed watching the GPL on Wednesday and Thursday when the attention turned to heads-up matches. Having webcams on the players added a lot, and things got even better when some of them began talking strategy as the hands were playing out.

I ended up writing something over on PokerNews about how watching the GPL Twitch stream, besides being occasionally entertaining, also appears to be a good way to learn a bit of strategy, too: “Strategy on the Stream: Learning by Watching the Global Poker League.”

I know those who paid any attention at all to the 25 hours or so of poker they showed this week are moving quickly to make judgments on whatever bit they saw -- which more often than not seems to have been just a short bit of the first day -- and perhaps draw some conclusions about the whole idea of the GPL, too. It’s understandable, really, given the ambitious talk surrounding the league to respond with thoughts about whether or not those ambitions are going to be realized. (Or if they even can be.)

Three hands in particular were great fun to watch -- one involving Daniel “Jungleman” Cates losing his stack in a cooler-type spot versus Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, another in which Justin Bonomo tanked for over four minutes following a river all-in by Timothy Adams (with both players sharing their reads during the tank), and third funny one in which Tom Marchese triple-barrel bluffed and hilariously walked away from the computer in a hand against Anthony Zinno.

To me these hands provided actual laugh-out-loud moments in addition to some genuinely interesting strategy talk. I highlighted them in the PokerNews article -- if you watched, or even if you didn’t, you can read what I had to say about them there.

The New York Rounders have taken an early lead in the Americas Conference, while the Hong Kong Stars sit stop the Eurasia Conference. Seeing how the teams fare going forward is another part of the story that I think might become increasingly interesting to follow going forward.

I have no idea whether the GPL is having or will have any effect on the non-poker playing crowd, or if it will manage to draw any small part of that group over onto the poker-playing side. But I will say I enjoyed watching poker this week as much or more than any other recent examples, outside of the WSOP Main Event, anyway.

By the way, everything is instantly archived over on the GPL site, if you’re curious to see any of it.

Image: Global Poker League.

Calling Up the GPL Feed

Major League Baseball had its opening day on Sunday, and for the first time I took the plunge and got the relatively cheap MLB At-Bat app that allows you (among other things) to listen to all the games. You even get to pick which team’s announcing crew you want to hear, and I’ve already had fun sampling a few of them.

I’ve also already realized I’ll only occasionally have time actually to listen to baseball games, but given the relatively cheap price of the app I’m not too bothered by that.

Meanwhile there was another opening day yesterday as the Global Poker League kicked off its inaugural season with live streaming of some six-max sit-n-gos played between representatives of the 12 GPL teams. I dialed up the Twitch channel on the Roku so it would play on the teevee while I worked on other things, and found it an enjoyable background hum that occasionally had me looking up as each of the SNGs got down to heads-up before concluding.

Can’t say I focused too intently on Griffin Benger and Sam Grafton’s commentary, although it seemed enjoyable when I did. I thought Laura Cornelius and Eric Danis did well, too, in the studio between matches, with their contributions helping to lend the proceedings the feeling of some kind of sporting event (a goal, I know, of the GPL and its attempt to “sportify” poker).

Watching an online tournament isn’t necessarily the most dynamic thing to witness, of course (and I say that as someone who has watched and reported on a lot of online poker over the years). The attention necessarily drifts, with only occasional hands standing out and most drifting past unnoticed.

Davidi Kitai made what seemed a remarkable fold on his way to winning the first SNG yesterday for the Paris Aviators. Dan “Jungleman” Cates, playing for the Berlin Bears, came in sixth of six in that initial match to earn his team zero points, then in the second one made a weird call of an all-in push by the Moscow Wolverines’ Dzmitry Urbanovich to lose most of his stack before taking sixth again.

Regarding the latter hand -- in which Cates instantly called the shove with J-8 (sooted!) -- Jungleman noted over Twitter that he didn’t mean to call the shove: “misread my hand in gpl, thought i had A9s somehow (j8s hand)... I was playing cash on side. Pretty tilting even though it's not for money...”

Some responded to that tweet by observing that it seemed to undercut the whole idea of the GPL a bit to have a player not giving the matches his full attention this way. Kind of thing does make it hard to compare folks playing online poker to actual sporting events. I mean we don’t see outfielders missing fly balls because they were checking Facebook or playing some other game on their phones.

In any case, it’s diverting and as I mentioned before my inner sports nerd delights in seeing early standings and statistics starting to build -- both for MLB and the GPL. Like baseball, it looks like from the GPL’s ambitious eight-month schedule they’ll be on the air pretty much all the time, too, for those of us curious enough (and having the time) to dip in to catch some of the action.

We’ll see how often I sample both feeds.

Image: Global Poker League.

The Other Opening Day: Global Poker League Starts Next Week

Looking at this schedule for the first season of the Global Poker League, just announced today. Matches involving the 12 teams start on April 5th and continue all of the way through to November 22nd when the finals are scheduled.

That means baseball gets going on Sunday, but on Tuesday there will be this other opening day that I might have to check out as well.

It appears as though there is a 14-week “regular season” schedule broken into two parts (the first lasting eight weeks, the latter one six), with a series of six “Summer Heats” coming in between that will coincide with the World Series of Poker playing out in Las Vegas (from early June to mid-July).

Each week of the regular season starts with some 6-max matches involving representatives from each of the six teams in each division (Eurasia and Americas), then has teams squaring off against one another over subsequent days.

I’m still in the dark regarding where and when all of this happens. If I’m following the press release correctly, these weekly matches (both the 6-max ones and the team-vs.-team ones) will all be online, “livestreamed and following an esports broadcast format.” Then the “Summer Heats” will be in person (I think), “filmed live on location in GPL’s Las Vegas Studio.” (Is that where the cube and playing while standing up comes in?) Then the final will apparently happen at the SSE Arena, Wembley (a place that seats 12,500).

It all remains pretty abstract, although my sports nerd side enjoys looking at schedules and imagining standings and statistics and associated whatnot. I think there will be a lot of interest in these first streams next week, at least among the poker community during a bit of a dry spell, tourney-wise. I wonder if that’ll drop off afterwards, or if there will be any appeal at all to fans of other esports who might gravitate over.

I think actually the whole project in a way is attempting to create a different, somewhat abstract version of the game -- one in which certain core elements (namely the investment of money and the individual participation) are being jettisoned in favor of highlighting other facets, including (I’m guessing) in-game strategy, personalities, and city identities.

We could step back, of course, and think about how tournament poker is itself a kind of abstraction of cash game poker, although not a hugely dramatic one. Much we take for granted about how tournaments work were once wholly new and strange -- not that long ago, in fact.

Such a long season -- I guess by the end it won’t seem so strange anymore, at least among those who stick around to follow it.

Image: Global Poker League.

Global Poker League… You’re on the Clock

Had that Global Poker League Twitch channel on the teevee during the afternoon and early evening, watching some of those American Poker Conference panels and then the draft for the Global Poker League.

Watching Twitch through the Roku is much, much better than on the laptop, I’ve discovered. For me Twitch never works properly via Safari, and while it plays okay on Chrome my laptop tends to run hot whenever I leave it on for a while. Meanwhile watching on television is a breeze, and so I was able to let the sucker play on over in the corner of the room while I worked on other things.

While my attention was coming and going, the panels were interesting and kind of reminded me a little of academic conferences from long ago where I gave my own presentations, listened to others’, and did the same sort of discussing and networking afterwards. Meanwhile the GPL draft similarly did a decent job of imitating the familiar, lengthy draft shows ESPN puts together for the NBA and NFL drafts. Kara Scott was even there to tell teams “you’re on the clock” when it was their turn to pick.

I’ve never much liked those other draft shows, mainly because I’ll know of only a few of the players being drafted (usually at the very start), making the rest of it kind of tedious. Meanwhile with this GPL draft I knew practically every player, team manager, and even the folks running back and forth in the background and turning up in random crowd shots, in many cases personally.

That alone made watching a little more fun. The team identities and logos are kind of interesting as well, and there is something kind of cool about a “global” league with various big cities represented around the world (four in the U.S., and one each in Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, and Russia).

Like many I’m still more than a little unclear about how the teams work, how the games will go, and the whole playing-while-standing-in-a-cube thing. There’s also the larger question of how exactly the GPL might invigorate poker, generally speaking, although with that I’m willing to exercise some patience. Gets a little fatiguing to keep hearing “stay tuned and find out,” but my curiosity about it all is certainly piqued enough to keep paying attention.

I will say this -- the apparent contrast between the GPL and the last attempt to create some kind of professional poker “league,” the ill-fated Epic Poker League, couldn’t be more stark.

Besides being incredibly short-sighted and impractical in the way it was run, the EPL from the start was purportedly about creating a context in which only the best could compete against the best. In other words, it was mostly about finding a way to keep others out the game.

The league’s commissioner Annie Duke introduced the EPL as “incredibly pro-centric” back in early 2011, arguing (unconvincingly) that the league would somehow represent “the one piece that’s kind of missing from the poker landscape right now... something for the best players in the world to compete against the best players in the world.”

Such an approach -- along with steep $20,000 buy-ins for events and fairly severe restrictions on who could enter them -- was enough to keep a lot of players away, then eventually the whole thing collapsed in on itself with the company that created the league declaring bankruptcy before a single season could be completed.

Meanwhile it’s clear that the Global Poker League seems to have a much different ethos, trying instead to be more inclusive and bring poker to a wider audience, if possible. The whole idea of having a league spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia is one indicator of such a mindset, and watching the draft yesterday there’s obviously a lot of focus on marketing and spreading positive messages about poker that go beyond just what the league itself and its teams will ultimately be doing.

Interestingly, the GPL used Global Poker Index rankings -- the lone piece of salvage remaining from the EPL wreckage -- to establish criteria for draft eligibility, having invited the top 1,000 ranked players to “opt in,” with a little over 200 doing so. The 48 players drafted yesterday came from that smaller group, and teams can now add two more players each as “wild cards” with no restrictions other than not being able to select any of the almost 800 who didn’t opt in for the draft. (That rule was implemented for the sake of fairness, not exclusion, as the GPL didn’t want top-ranked players to opt-out and then join teams later.)

We’ll see how it all goes and whether or not the GPL gathers any momentum in its own right, as well as whether it does produce these intended effects as described by entrepreneur and league founder Alex Dreyfus to help promote the game in positive ways. I’m intrigued about it, and as long as I can watch via my Roku I’ll probably do so once the season gets going.

Image: Global Poker League.

Here Comes HoldemX

I played a few games of this new HoldemX today. There’s a site up and running now where you can create an account and play. I think the site actually just launched, with this being called the “alpha version” of the game meant to introduce it and get feedback from players.

This article on PokerNews gives a bit of background about the game and a little on how it fits into this larger vision of Alex Dreyfus and the Global Poker League. The article points out how the game combines hold’em and other card-based games like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone (about which I was writing a little here a while back), and Uno.

It also explains how the game involves both the regular 52-card deck used in hold’em and (in this version) a 15-card “Discovery Deck.” If you go over to the site and mess around as I did, you’ll see these are listed as “Xcards.” They’re essentially game-changing cards, letting players do things like change or add to their hole cards, change community cards in various ways (including adding sixth street), and so on.

Here’s a picture of the 15 “Xcards” to give you an idea (click to enlarge):

Hands are played like hold’em, with extra rounds inserted along the way where players are able to employ those “Xcards” to change how the hand is going. It’s a bit like playing hold’em with wild cards, but with a lot more variables greatly affecting strategy. The games are timed as well meaning you can get through one in just a few minutes.

Dreyfus is quoted in the article explaining how this is in fact a rudimentary version of the game using “only” 15 of these “Xcards” or “Discovery Deck” cards. The idea, he says, is to provide “an educational experience to give players a chance to play around with the fundamental mechanisms of the game before flooding the platform with multiple deck options, special cards, and other features.”

The article also emphasizes that the game is not intended to be played for money -- only chips. “Hearthstone is not about money: it is about fun, special effects, and skills,” explains Dreyfus, who envisions HoldemX to function similarly (and not to compete with poker).

The tagline is “Poker Enhanced,” but I’m not sure what poker players are going to think of the game. It seems like you’d have to have an interest in poker to want to try it out, but the differences from regular hold’em -- or even from most forms of poker -- are so great even in this “simple” early version, you’d have to have a more substantial interest in games and problem-solving to want to play.

A decent percentage of poker players do like these sort of challenges, but they also like playing cards for money, so that, too, seems like another hurdle HoldemX will have to clear.

I may get back on there at some point just to mess around some more. If you do, let me know what you think.

Images: HoldemX.com.

Travel Report: 2016 PCA, Day 7: High Rolling

Actually started yesterday working in the room and listening to David Bowie all morning -- the “Berlin trilogy” albums (Low, ”Heroes”, and Lodger). Then once the afternoon came I was back in the poker room here at the Atlantis helping cover the $25K High Roller yesterday at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, where the field was super-stacked as was expected.

There were 214 entries yesterday, and there will likely be a handful more to start today before late reg and the reentry period ends with the first hands of Day 2. The total will be shy of last year’s 269, but will still create a big prize pool and a huge score for the winner. From that group 106 made it through to today.

Chatted briefly yesterday with Alex Dreyfus of the Global Poker Index who showed me the 12 team logos for the Global Poker League. I believe the official announcement of that comes today. The logos did look cool, and while I’ll still mostly in the dark about what the GPL will be like, I am a little intrigued, I’ll admit.

Gotta run this morning as thanks to the encouragement of Vera Valmore I have decided to take the “Stingray Experience” here at the Atlantis, which involves wading around with, feeding, and snorkeling/swimming with around 130 cownose stingrays (no shinola!). You can read more about what it involves here.

Half-terrified, half-excited about getting so close to the stingrays. Assuming all goes well, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, check out the PokerStars blog today for updates and more on Day 2 of the $25K and Day 5 of the PCA Main Event, the penultimate days for each.

Photo: courtesy Carlos Monti/PokerStars blog.

2015 WSOP November Nine, Day 1: Having Fun Filling the Pauses

Sat up until 2 a.m. here last night until Pierre Neuville was eliminated in seventh and play was paused at the 2015 World Series of Poker Main Event final table. The 72-year-old lasted 72 hands, as it happened. At least he didn’t go out with seven-deuce.

I was a little surprised at how tightly Neuville played for much of the night. Having seen him take chances and be bold in other tournaments before -- including online -- I knew he liked to play against the old-man image and mix things up. He and I talked about that very idea back in August, in fact, when I had a chance to interview him at EPT Barcelona.

But alas last night seemed to go in a different direction for the Belgian. Neuville was shown making some tight folds, then got a bit unlucky in a couple of spots including his last hand, although by then he was so short a double-up wouldn’t have helped him a lot, anyway.

Meanwhile the other older player, Neil Blumenfield (aged 61), made me think of Jerry Yang early on when he three-bet with Q-8-offsuit. He did well for himself to maintain a competitive stack all night, although leader Joe McKeehen -- now with over 91 million chips or nearly three times that of the chase pack that includes Ofer Zvi Stern and Blumenfield -- is going to be hard to catch.

Speaking of Stern, his lengthy tanking quickly became the foremost topic of conversation last night.

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….vi Stern. #November9,” tweeted Joe Stapleton. “Get it Ofer with,” was Remko Rinkema’s take. Meanwhile my constructive contributions included “At this rate, they won’t finish before Tanksgiving” and “Did I just hear a commercial saying if you have an erection lasting longer than four hands to call your physician?”

I saw Kevmath tweet something this morning about the action begin on Stern for something like 55 minutes or so out of the five-plus hours it took to play those 72 hands. All of the commercial breaks during the first two-and-a-half hours (during prime time) also helped lengthen things considerably.

Regarding the Stern commentary (pun intended) on Twitter last night, let me also shout out to D.J. MacKinnon and Jess Welman for a couple of Global Poker League-inspired thoughts. “Wonder how much more exciting this final table would be with a huge cube around it,” speculated MacKinnon, who then offered a laugh-out-loud artist's rendering as a follow-up. “You know what would make this final table so much better?” Jess then asked. “If everyone was standing up.”

That’s my cat, Sweetie, up above, by the way, mesmerized by another hand involving Stern.

Now, of course, the “shot clock” talk has begun again, although as has been the case when that has come up before, I can’t really get behind the idea. Players playing slowly is part of the game, and if other players have a problem they can call the clock to try to speed things up. Obviously Stern doesn’t have to play that way, but just as obviously he has every right to do so.

Phil Hellmuth tweeted something about him receiving a warning at one point, although it might have been the Stern warning (pun intended) was not for his slow pace of play. (Can’t really trust Hellmuth always to know what he’s tweeting about.) Will be curious to see if Stern is influenced at all into speeding up after no doubt getting feedback on what happened last night.

Have to say, though, I enjoyed the show last night, even with the sluggish pace. In part it was because I like watching how well McKeehen has been pushing around others by pushing his chips. But mostly it was because of the tweets, which were a fun way to fill all those pauses.

Cubing the Cards

A week ago came a press release from something called Mediarex Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Global Poker Index, announcing this new Global Poker League that is set to launch early next year.

The presser describes the desire of the GPI and its CEO Alex Dreyfus to “sportify” poker “in a bid for the Global Poker Index to become the equivalent of the NASCAR, NFL, NBA, ATP, or PGA for poker.” In an interview with PokerNews, Dreyfus underscored the importance of making poker spectator friendly, with the GPL and its planned-for schedule intended as a step in that direction.

The GPL will consist of 12 teams, it sounds like, who will compete with each other over the course of a 14-week schedule. Sounds like an extension of the earlier Global Poker Masters experiment from back in March of this year -- you can read details over on the Mediarex website.

“We wanted to think out of the box,” explains Dreyfus in the PN interview. Not sure if the pun was intended or not, but the GPL will have players playing inside a box -- “The Cube,” that is, described as the GPL’s “signature arena” à la UFC’s Octagon.

I’ve been skimming for several minutes now this elaborate page describing “The Cube” on the Mediarex site, though to be honest the idea still kind of escapes me. It is like a big clear box that kind of reminds me of the squash class I once took. (The photo credits to “SquashPics.com” might have further planted that seed for me.)

The “arena” lets both TV viewers (or Twitch or whatever) as well as a live audience see and hear the players as well as access all the stats, cards, bets, and so on -- again, I suppose kind of replicating watching or attending a sporting event with a scoreboard nearby tallying relevant data and results.

I’m not real sure what all of this is or is supposed to be. It doesn’t look much like poker, and of course no previous attempts at team-based poker have ever really worked to produce more than a curiosity.

It excites some curiosity, sure, and I’ll be staying tuned to see what happens. “The Cube” feels like a big weird roll of the dice, although without knowing exactly what is being gambled it’s hard to have a rooting interest just yet.