Ever Heard of the “Silent Bowl”?

Was reading an article over at the newly-designed ESPN site this afternoon about the NBA playoffs in which there was a reference to LeBron James’s practice of watching recorded games with the sound down. In the article his teammate Kyrie Irving noted how he’s picked up the habit, too.

“One of the things I took from Bron is putting the games on mute and just listen to music while you watch the game,” Irving is quoted as saying. “No disrespect to the announcers or halftime show, but you want to be in silence. Watch good basketball, high-intensity basketball, just watch the game.”

I love watching basketball, and indeed sometimes will have games on with the sound down as it is eminently easy to follow nearly everything without the commentators. More often than not I’ll keep the sound up, but it’s not a problem at all knowing where things stand at any moment after hitting that mute button.

The story reminded me of an NFL game from way back in 1980 aired on NBC, a late-season contest between the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins that came to be known as the “Silent Bowl.” In an effort to boost ratings for a meaningless regular season game between a couple of mediocre teams, Don Ohlmeyer (then the executive producer of the network’s sports division) came up with the experiment.

A quick search about that game took me to a feature about it from a few years back on the ESPN site. There a few more details about the broadcast are shared, including how NBC used more graphics than usual while also having the stadium’s public address announcer make more descriptive comments to help viewers track the action.

They didn’t have the score on screen at all times, though, nor an inset showing the clock. In fact, those didn’t become regular features for televised football until 1994 (later than I would have guessed).

Ratings were higher for the game than would have been expected without the gimmick, and apparently response to the broadcast was more favorable than not, although no one ever thought for a moment that announcerless games would ever become the norm. From the perspective of three decades later, Ohlmeyer sounds like he kinda sorta regrets being remembered for the stunt, but I think it was an interesting idea to have tried.

While not perfectly analogous, televised poker seems as though it cannot do without commentators (even though some live streams -- including at the WSOP -- have tried to do without). That said, I spend a fair share of time watching online poker tournaments which though not necessarily nail-biting are nonetheless easy enough to follow given all of the detailed information available -- including “instant replay,” even.

Now that I think about it, I turn the sound down for that and listen to music, too.

Closing Thoughts (NBC & the Olympics)

Played a little poker last night while watching the heavily-edited, frequently-interrupted, and frustratingly-abridged version of the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony on NBC.

Poker-wise much fun was had as Events No. 5 and 6 in the first season of the Hard-Boiled Poker league played out over at PokerStars (in my “Hard-Boiled Poker Home Game”).

There will be 20 events altogether during this inaugural HBP HG season, with two every Sunday night through the end of September. I was determined this week to grab a few points to try and move up a little in the league standings, having played four events without scoring any at all. The way the PokerStars points system works, you have to finish in the top third of a tourney to get any points.

I just missed making the points in Event No. 5, the PLO8 tourney, finishing fifth (of 12) despite playing several hands badly. I did get there in Event No. 6, though, the NLH turbo one in which I turned into a card rack near the end to finish runner-up (of 15).

Last night’s winners were LuckKey4Me (No. 5) and thejim2020 (No. 6). Psx120 managed to grab some points last night to sneak into first place in the Season 1 standings, just ahead of thejim2020 and Gambit 727. Still plenty of opportunities to catch the leaders and win the copy of Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats by Al Alvarez (as I talked about Friday). Look to the right for info about joining my Home Game.

Meanwhile, I occasionally enjoyed some of the closing ceremony performances, with Eric Idle’s reprise of Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” a clear highlight. Overall the spectacle seemed more like a super-long, highly uneven Super Bowl halftime show than a logical conclusion to the Olympics narrative, but the bits shown between commercials -- 20 minutes’ worth per hour (no shinola) -- were mostly entertaining to listen to and watch.

Was definitely dismayed, though, by some of NBC’s cuts to the show, including the decision to drop Ray Davies doing “Waterloo Sunset.” Leaving out Muse’s performance of “Survival,” the official song of the London games, seemed another unfortunate omission. We didn’t get to see Kate Bush, either, doing “Running Up That Hill,” the opener from one of the best pop LPs ever, Hounds of Love.

Of course, even when Kate Bush was at her most popular here in the U.S. it was mostly just with a small category of folks, so I get NBC deciding to show other, more familiar acts (although some of those featured in truth aren’t all that big on this side of the pond).

I kept it on, though, as I knew from afternoon tweets that The Who would be coming on at the end to rock Wembley. But NBC weirdly decided to stop the show at 11 p.m. just prior to The Who’s appearance.

“That concludes the closing ceremony,” said host Bob Costas just as the U.K. band Take That finished their tune, “Rule the World,” adding “We’ll be back to wrap things up after this.”

What we were watching didn’t really conclude the closing ceremony, I thought. And that “we’ll be back” teaser made it sound like there was more to come. So with the poker tourneys having long ended, I continued to watch.

Immediately after Costas spoke, NBC began to show the premiere of a new situation comedy it has been incessantly hyping with commercials throughout the last two-and-a-half weeks, Animal Practice. I thought at first I was watching another commercial, but after two minutes realized it was an actual episode.

During that span I saw a woman calling to her cat, Giggles, from the balcony of her high-rise apartment. The cat then leaps from the ledge -- kind of an upsetting thing to see, actually. The show then cuts to the waiting room of an ER for animals, where a doctor soon explains to the cat’s owner that Giggles will survive the fall. The doctor absurdly adds the cat had attempted suicide because it was in heat and frustrated. He then seems to hit on the woman.

It was an especially unfunny and unpleasant couple of minutes. And as soon as I understood it wasn’t stopping after that lame opening, I shut the sucker off and went to bed. I see this morning that NBC apparently did air The Who’s performance an hour later, after the local news.

With Costas’ lead-in and the withholding of the finale, NBC had literally tried to trick some part of its large audience to watch the pilot of this surely-doomed sitcom. As @Franzgleekout tweeted last night “NBC pulling this Animal Practice stunt is like someone who's just stolen your wallet kicking you in the balls for good measure.” Indeed, NBC’s decision-making with regards to scheduling and audience manipulation headlined this morning’s coverage of the show.

I enjoyed following the Olympic Games as much as anyone, but found that other relentless game of hide-and-seek NBC played with its delayed, edited coverage incredibly wearisome. Such a mess, really, and probably symbolic in some way of our highly cynical, commercialized culture.

As a sports fan, I’m glad to be done with all that applesauce and move back to enjoying live sporting events in real time. I’m ready for some football.

What I’m saying is, I’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is...

Tuning In To the Human Race

Yesterday afternoon I joined most of the world in watching the men’s 100-meter final from the 2012 London Olympics. Apparently something like 2 billion people were watching the race as it happened. Kind of incredible to imagine, really.

Was absolutely thrilling to watch, with Usain Bolt once again prevailing over what had to be the strongest ever field of sprinters. Bolt finished the race in 9.63 seconds -- the second-best ever time (after his own 9.58) -- with seven of the eight finalists finishing in less than 10 seconds. There were three Americans among the field, too, with Justin Gatlin of New York earning the bronze. Bolt’s fellow countryman from Jamaica, Yohan Blake, took the silver.

Like many here in the U.S., I didn’t bother waiting around the six-plus hours until 11:15 p.m. Eastern time to watch the delayed coverage on NBC, but rather viewed the race live online. Luckily I was watching the BBC 1 feed, as the online stream NBC was delivering apparently failed for just about everyone who tried to view it that way.

On the teevee, NBC was in fact showing an event live yesterday afternoon when the 100 meter race was happening, only it was in beach volleyball, a quarterfinal match involving one of the U.S. teams (April Ross and Jennifer Kessy) and a team from the Czech Republic (Marketa Slukova and Kristyna Kolocova). Actually that match had not even started, but NBC was offering some pre-match commentary while the sprinters were running over at the Olympic Stadium.

Like many, I found myself scratching my head over NBC’s decision to withhold live coverage of the race. I understand ratings for the prime time hours have been good (as in up from previous Olympics) which I suppose means the strategy of showing events delayed and edited is working for the network. This despite the fact that NBC shows 20 full minutes’ worth of commercials during each hour of prime time (no shinola).

But this was a weekend afternoon, a popular time for Americans to watch live sports on television. And something more than a quarter of the world’s population was watching the event as it happened.

Sure, I get that this is all business and someone somewhere pulling the strings at NBC has calculated that if the network aired the 100-meter final live late Sunday afternoon that would affect the viewership six-plus hours later significantly enough to warrant suppressing the live coverage. That said, I’m one of those who sometimes likes to pretend the Olympics are about something other than money -- say, the intangible value that might come from sharing the experience of witnessing some positive form of human achievement along with 2 billion other people.

But I’m also cynical enough to know that in reality that’s probably just happy-hippy-talk.

It’s tempting to draw some sort of connection between what NBC is doing with the Olympics and ESPN’s coverage of the WSOP this year (this is a poker blog, after all). Recall last year’s experiment with the “almost live” coverage of Days 3-8 of the Main Event. Those shows in July were well received and drew relatively large audiences, but the later edited shows saw a precipitous drop in ratings.

Some later attributed lower ratings for the “highlight” shows as having been caused in part by the earlier live coverage -- that is, viewers who watched in July didn’t bother to watch again later on. So this year there was no “almost live” coverage of the Main Event. (The edited shows from this year’s ME begin on ESPN next week.)

Of course, comparing a poker tournament to an event like the one that happened yesterday is perhaps not quite fair. As fun as the “almost live” WSOP coverage could be for some of us to watch, one could reasonably argue an event like a lengthy poker tournament is in fact better presented in highlight form or at least edited in some fashion. And while any delay necessarily affects the suspense inherently created by a live competition, it isn’t as vital a concern with poker as with sporting events such as the 100-meter dash.

That’s not even mentioning how nothing will ever happen in poker that could possibly attract the attention of 2 billion people. Heck, I don’t believe ESPN has ever even gotten 2 million people to watch the WSOP.

There are still plenty of other live events being carried on NBC’s several affiliated networks for Americans to enjoy, including the basketball and soccer (both of which have dedicated channels showing all games/matches live).

Still feels like NBC stumbled significantly yesterday, though, in its chase for ratings. There was something bigger going on. More human.

A Lifestyle-and-Death Story

Late Friday night -- while a lot of us were watching St. Louis win Game 7 of the World Series -- NBC’s “Dateline” took the opportunity to share the sordid tale of professional poker player Ernest “Ernie” Scherer III. Was another instance of poker turning up in the mainstream in a not-so-flattering light, I suppose, although I’d hope most who saw the program wouldn’t take Scherer as representative of poker players as a whole.

I actually flipped over a couple of times on Friday during the commercials to catch some of the show. Then over the weekend I had a chance to watch the whole thing online.

I’d heard bits and pieces of the story beforehand. Scherer had been a minor character on the pro poker circuit for a few years, known by many of the players but not a guy the average fan would know about.

As far as tourneys are concerned, Scherer’s career peaked in 2006 and 2007 with a handful of WSOP cashes, including one final table in ’06 in the $3,000 limit hold’em event won by Bill Chen. That’s Scherer in the Full Tilt Poker cap on Chen’s right in the picture below (a shot repeatedly shown during the “Dateline” show). According to Hendon Mob, Scherer racked up nearly $340,000 worth of winnings from 2003 to 2008.

Scherer was found guilty of killing both of his parents in their Pleasanton, California home in March 2008. He was arrested in February 2009, tried and found guilty in early 2011, then sentenced to consecutive life terms for the murders.

Introducing the story, “Dateline” host Lester Holt set up the program by referring to the murders of Ernest Scherer, Jr. and his wife Charlene Abendroth, then introduced Ernie as a possible suspect. The opening immediately connects “poker” with a certain “lifestyle,” delivering what sounds like an implicit judgment on what it means to be a pro player.

“Their son, it turned out, played poker for a living,” says Holt. “Could that lifestyle have had something to do with it?”

The angle subsequently taken by the show -- titled “The Player” -- was to present the story of the murders and investigation mostly from the perspective of Adrian Solomon, a woman who’d had a two-year relationship with Scherer from early 2006 until early 2008 (i.e., until just prior to the murders).

Thus a lot of the show consists of correspondent Keith Morrison interviewing Solomon. While visiting Las Vegas on business, Solomon met Scherer and became romantically involved with him, their mostly long-distance relationship eventually progressing to a point where they were talking about marriage and children before they finally broke it off.

Scherer is introduced as from a Mormon family and college-educated. We also learn he was an Eagle scout, a detail I found kind of interesting. You might recall how last week Rep. Joe Barton mentioned in that House hearing he’d learned poker in the Boy Scouts. Inspired by that comment, I ended up looking into a few other connections between poker and scouting, writing about it for my next Epic Poker “Community Cards” column (which will appear tomorrow). (EDIT [added 11/2/11]: Here is that column on poker and the Boy Scouts.)

Anyhow, Solomon notes early on how it seemed a little odd that Scherer would be a professional poker player with such a background. In other words, being educated, having some sort of religious upbringing, and becoming an Eagle Scout all seem to contrast with the image of someone playing cards for a living.

Scherer represented himself as a successful player to Solomon, although as the show eventually spells out he was losing a lot more than he was winning. He was also lying to her about just about everything else -- including the fact that he was married and had a child. In fact, it turns out he had a few different mistresses in various locations.

Sticking with Solomon’s P.O.V., we learn with her about the especially brutal double-murder of Scherer’s parents, then leave her for a while to follow the detectives’ initially unsure investigation. Later in the story we hear about Scherer trying later on to revive their relationship, telling Solomon he “was thinking of changing his lifestyle, quitting poker” if she’d take him back. But by then detectives have told her about his wife and child and she’s not interested in any such reunion. She’s also struggling to figure out how her “read” of Scherer had been so far off.

It takes a while, but investigators eventually are able to come up with a motive for Scherer. They’re also able (more or less) to place him at the scene of the crime the night of the murders.

Scherer was deep in debt, something like $150,000 in the hole between credit cards and what he owed to casinos. He’d also borrowed $616,000 from his father to buy a house. He couldn’t get a loan, it is explained, because banks had become “not quite so sanguine anymore about the security of poker player’s income.”

Scherer had missed a payment to his father just before the murders. Also, it was determined that he stood to inherit half the parents’ considerable estate on his 30th birthday, just a few months away at the time of the killings. “‘His house of cards was collapsing before his very eyes,’” the prosecutor would say later when making the case against Scherer.

Eventually the detectives are able to produce a few different pieces of evidence that together appear to put Scherer at the home on the night of the killings, too. Scherer’s wife tries to get him to confess in a recorded phone call, their conversation described as involving her working a “bluff” and the two “playing” each other like poker players. That doesn’t quite elicit anything damning, but there’s a ton of circumstantial evidence that ultimately proved persuasive enough to get the guilty verdict.

It sounds like Scherer’s status as a poker player didn’t help him much, either, when it came to the jurors’ consideration of the case. In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the story was how the prosecutors, the defense, and the jury all understood that Scherer’s “lifestyle” was being judged along with all of the evidence and argumentation regarding the actual crime.

“He is very proficient at misinformation and disinformation,” explained one of the investigators, alluding at once to Scherer’s poker playing and to his allegedly having planted some misleading evidence at the crime scene.

“‘It goes back to him thinking ‘I’m at a table and there’s all kinds of chips in the middle,’” says another, characterizing what he believed to be Scherer’s thinking while on the stand. “‘I’ve bluffed some of the best,’” he continues, “‘and these 12 people, they’re nothing compared to some of the poker players that I’ve bluffed so I’m gonna give it my best.’”

The defense apparently made much of the fact that prejudice against his “lifestyle” was clouding over the fact that the physical evidence connecting their client to the murders was all circumstantial. Morrison alludes to that argument near the end when interviewing a couple of jurors, saying how the defense lawyers were “claiming it was his lifestyle the prosecution put on trial.”

“Somebody should,” cracks one of the jurors in response, adding that “all other things being equal, his lifestyle counted against him.”

These “Dateline”-type shows can be engrossing sometimes. One of my all-time favorite films is Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, the 1988 documentary that kind of provided the template both in form and content for all of these procedural-slash-true crime news shows. But I don’t really think this one would’ve grabbed my attention if it weren’t for the poker connection. In fact, it kind of felt like there were a number of details about the actual case that got glossed over in favor of promoting Solomon’s story and her tangential involvement.

Just as there was no “smoking gun” in the actual case, there was no explicit charge against poker as being to blame for what happened. I guess, though, it’s possible some who watched might feel there’s some “circumstantial evidence” suggesting as much. The image of poker or poker pros presented by the show certainly wasn’t favorable, and the show pretty much ignored the possibility that there was such a thing as a poker pro living a healthy “lifestyle.”

Solomon did note that being a poker player hardly made one more or less likely to be a murderer, although it was suggested throughout that his ability to deceive at the tables characterized how he related to her and others elsewhere, too. Another woman -- another of Scherer’s girlfriends -- was also shown explicitly saying “that’s a very far jump from being a poker player to murdering your parents.” But even she was speaking of poker as a strike against him, something that had to be forgiven, so to speak, along with his many other liaisons of which she was aware during their relationship.

That said, I don’t necessarily fault the producers for using poker and gambling as they did here. Truthfully, while the great majority of us can only speculate about what ultimately motivates a killer, the “lifestyle” of reckless gambling and accumulating significant debt wasn’t without significance in this particular story.

And really, there’s a lot worse here to be sorry about than poker’s image taking yet another hit.

Online Gambling in the Mainstream Media; or, Getting Frank with Leno

A late night for your humble scribbler. Was up following the first day of action over at PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker, in particular Event No. 2, that $10,300 buy-in “High Roller” event. (See full schedule here.) Sucker didn’t end until daybreak here on the east coast, actually, with CrabMaki (a U.K. player named Dave Shallow) taking the $605,655 prize for winning. Here’s the full recap of Event No. 2 over on the PokerStars blog.

Speaking of late nights and poker, you probably heard there were a couple of occasions last week when online poker made it onto late night television, popping up in the “mainstream” -- i.e., on major network shows -- as a subject of discussion.

One was that “Nightline” segment about online poker that after several delays finally aired on ABC. (I wrote a little something here in anticipation of that report a couple of weeks ago.) While there was a kind of “cautionary tale”-like atmosphere attached to the report that folks under the age of 21 are playing poker online, I thought the piece ended up being about as balanced as one could hope for, and even perhaps shed a positive light (overall) on online poker as not necessarily a hopelessly degenerate activity.

If you missed it, you can view the “Nightline” piece here.

That segment aired on Tuesday night. Coincidentally, Rep. Barney Frank was a guest on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on NBC that same evening, and they, too, talked some about online gambling.

It was amid a discussion of individual liberty that Frank chose to allude in a general way to the legislative fight currently underway involving his H.R. 2267, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act. At the end of July, Frank’s bill was passed by his House Financial Services Committee, and now awaits consideration by the entire House and/or Senate.

Referring to his proposed bill, Frank noted how licensing and regulating online gambling in the U.S. would lead to “billions of dollars” in tax revenue, and the studio audience cheered in response. But rather than agree with Frank (and the crowd), Leno then raised an objection to online gambling -- a very familiar one, actually.

If you didn’t catch Frank on Leno’s show last week, here it is (the talk of online gambling starts right around the 3:50-mark):



Here is what Leno said by way of objecting to online gambling:

“To me, Vegas works because you have to go to the desert to get there. You have to make an effort. You go to the desert, you lose your money and you come home. You can’t go to the desert again unless you get more money. If you’re sitting at home and you’re up late at night and you got your little credit card, next thing you know... it’s like a mini bar. You’re not going to eat the potato chips unless they are in the mini-bar.”

We’ve heard this line before. So has Frank -- many times -- and he had a ready response. Frank pointed out to Leno that gambling is available in other places than Vegas. Frank also explained that his H.R. 2267 wouldn’t allow for the use of credit cards to gamble online.

The discussion then moved on to lotteries and other issues, but did circle back to Frank’s position that adults shouldn’t be treated like children as Leno’s whole “you have to go to the desert” argument implies -- as though when it comes to gambling we all need artificial restrictions in place to prevent us from constantly doing harm to ourselves. You know, sort of like putting the cookie jar up on the refrigerator where we can’t reach it easily and thus spoil our dinners.

Leno’s line about the mini-bars made me think back briefly to my summer in Las Vegas. I lived for nearly two months in a hotel room while there helping cover the WSOP for PokerNews.

There was a mini-bar in my room, of course, full of overpriced snack items and beverages for the taking. Somehow I managed to resist taking a single item from the mini-bar during my entire stay there, knowing I could purchase all of those things at a quarter of the price if I just figured out a way to leave the room.

Actually, it wasn’t that hard for me. As Muddy Waters once sang, I’m a man. Way past twenty-one. Truth be told, I have been able to decide for myself about such things for a long time now.

I guess Leno is in part going for the laugh there. It’s funny to think of adults as being childish, immature, etc. But I think he also genuinely objects to online gambling in the U.S. And the fact is, as Leno’s continued popularity shows, a lot of people in America tend to like Leno’s lines.

Why do they like Leno? I have no idea. Maybe it’s because, well, he’s just there. Like the mini-bar.