On the Relative Watchability of Poker (Again)

Just a quick sign-off to the week today to share something unrelated to politics or elections or the like. I mean, it’s a poker blog, you know?

Saw my buddy Tim Fiorvanti -- formerly of BLUFF magazine and now writing for ESPN -- tweeting out today a new article appearing on ESPN in which one of the site’s senior writers Arash Markazi shares a personal reflection of having watched this year’s World Series of Poker Main Event final table.

Markazi isn’t necessarily a “poker guy,” although as he explains at the start of his column he plays now and then and like a lot of people during the 2000s found a lot of enjoyment in watching televised poker.

He shares the not uncommon view that a big reason why he found poker TV compelling back then was “because of the characters I had become connected to while watching all those shows.” He also got a little tired of it all even before Black Friday, and sounds as though he’d drifted away from watching over recent years (again, like many others).

Markazi went to the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino this year to watch all three nights of the final table. To summarize his general impression, he wasn’t too entertained, finding it all much too tedious and tame. To be fair, Markazi seems to be applying some of the criteria for what makes a sporting event entertaining to this in-person experience of the final table, which most of us who have spent time watching people play poker know isn’t really the best way to judge.

Even so, he persuasively laments that even after watching players going at it for more than a dozen hours, he “had no real connection to them” and thus couldn’t find a way to be engaged.

He thinks back to Jamie Gold at the 2006 WSOP Main Event final table who helps provide a sharp contrast between a fond poker watching memory and the more recent experience. He talks to Gold as well, who affirms the much-shared point that “you need to have players talking to have heroes and villains.” Since the 2016 WSOP Main Event final table featured relatively little of that, there was necessarily going to be (in Markazi’s estimation) a “disconnect between the viewers and the players at the table.”

Interestingly, Markusi doesn’t mention any of the coverage leading up to the final table, which I have to assume he didn’t see. If he had, he would no doubt have discussed the prominent role William Kassouf played in those shows, cast as he was as a kind of “villain” precisely because of his table talk or so-called “speech play.”

He might also have addressed the WSOP’s somewhat confused handling of Kassouf, which could have been interpreted as representing a position directly opposed to the one Markusi and Gold espouse in the column -- namely, that table talk is a very good thing when it comes to making poker more interesting as a “spectator sport.”

Anyhow, check out Markusi’s article if you’re curious, titled “Poker is lacking the heroes and villains it so desperately needs.”

Image: “Bax's parents watching him play the #mainevent #finaltable #wsop #poker #gojohnnygo #bax,” Dutch Boyd. CC BY 2.0.

2013 WSOP, Day 42: Running Good, Catching Hands

Much as players in a poker tournament will experience occasional stretches of “run good” or being “card dead,” so, too, will those live reporting a tournament undergo periods when “good hands” are dealt to them one after another and others when their timing is off and they keep witnessing non-newsworthy orbits’ worth of hands being folded.

Day 1s of large field tourneys -- or, in the case of the Main Event, Day 1 flights, Day 2 flights, and even Day 3 flights -- often present this challenge, since a reporter frequently finds him or herself wandering around a large group of tables, say 20 or 30 or even more, looking for hands or other stories to report.

The Main Event has such a deep structure there are many patient players who will go hours at a time during the first couple of days without getting involved in a big showdown with a significant pot at stake. Thus if you’re only passing by that player’s table once a half-hour or so, it can be easy to miss those moments when the player is actually doing something worth reporting.

For me there were a few dry stretches yesterday that came up while covering the “Day 2a/2b” flight of the 2013 WSOP Main Event, but for the most part my timing was pretty good and I had plenty to report as things went along. In fact, I had one short little “rush” (so to speak) lasting half an hour in which every time I went back out on the floor I’d find myself walking right up to another especially interesting and highly reportable hand.

One of the hands was a standard all-in situation involving PokerStars Team Pro Toni Judet in which he’d gotten A-A and an opponent a couple of seats over had K-K and the pair predictably got all of Judet’s below average stack in the middle before the flop. Alas for Judet, a king spiked on the river and he was eliminated.

Just minutes later I saw and reported on a more interesting hand involving Phil Galfond in which he’d opened from early position and got two callers behind, then the small blind three-bet and he and the other two all called. Galfond then flopped a set of eights, called the small blind’s flop bet (while the other two got out), then called his opponent’s turn shove with an overpair of queens and won a big pot while scoring an elimination.

Again, it was kind of a standard situation, although given how deep the players were one might have imagined Galfond’s opponent perhaps found a way to avoid getting felted in the hand. (Easy to say, hard to do.) But from the standpoint of a reporter looking for interesting hands involving known players, it stood out as a nice “find” among lots of less notable hands.

But the most interesting hand of that half-hour -- and as it turned out, of the entire day -- came between 2012 WSOP Main Event champ Greg Merson and Wilfried Harig, who was sitting to Merson’s right. I happened to be there to watch this one with Tim Fiorvanti of BLUFF who once again was compiling another of those start-to-finish pieces following Merson’s entire day.

During the hand we were trying to remember Harig, as he definitely seemed like someone we’d encountered before, and in fact it was shortly afterwards that we all remembered him as last year’s 15th-place finisher in the ME. As it would turn out, post-hand table talk helped ensure anyone standing nearby would know who Harig was.

Like the Galfond hand (which came a little later), this one saw a player raise and a couple call (including Harig), then Merson three-betting, only in this case Harig was the only player to stick around for the flop which came . That’s when the pair surprisingly bet back and forth enough to get Harig’s big stack all in and almost all of Merson’s, too.

Merson had top two pair with , but Harig had for a set. Then the turn stunningly brought the to give Merson the better full house and leave Harig drawing dead. Harig graciously shook Merson’s hand and left, and that’s when he reminded the table how he’d knocked out Harig last summer in the ME after the latter had committed his stack with pocket aces versus Merson’s king-jack, and Merson flopped a king then turned a jack.

As it happened, it was an uncanny reprise of poor Harig’s final hand in the 2012 ME, and that made for an interesting post punctuated by Merson’s own tweet regarding it.

Like I say, watching and reporting on that hand was part of a fun, brief sequence of “event highlight”-type hands that had more to do with having the good fortune of being out on the floor rather than behind the laptop at the moments they were occurring than anything else. As in poker, there’s certainly some skill involved in being able to anticipate when and where interesting clashes are more likely to occur. But luck is an obvious factor, too.

Today it’s back at it for Day 2c in which those surviving from the large field that played Day 1c will be returning. (All of the different flights will finally join together for tomorrow’s Day 3.) The larger field means more tables and players, and probably more hands of note will be happening, too. Here’s hoping I can “run good” -- both figuratively and literally -- and catch as many good hands as I can.