Spent the last couple of days watching poker on my computer. The PokerStars Championship Sochi series is running, and as I’m staying on the farm for that one I’ve had occasion to check in now and then from here to follow the coverage both on the PokerStars blog and via PokerStars TV.
Then yesterday I had Day 1 of the Super High Roller Bowl on all day, that $300K buy-in tournament that started last night and lasts for several days. Both events are serving as a kind of prelude to the World Series of Poker that gets cranking on Wednesday.
Did very much enjoy seeing Kevin Hart knock out Phil Hellmuth on Day 1. Hellmuth had a bit of a cooler versus Justin Bonomo early (flopped set versus flopped straight), then as a short stack lost all his chips in a set-under-set hand versus Hart.
In fact, when the cards were dealt and Hellmuth had pocket treys versus Hart’s queens, I was already imagining a Q-3-x flop and that’s exactly what happened. Such fun.
Realizing the NBA Finals don’t start until Thursday -- a full week since the last game of the conference finals completed -- I had to joke on Twitter that poker had found a “sweet spot” amid what amounted to a “November Nine-like wait” for basketball to return.
Indeed, the entire WSOP, right through the Main Event that will go until July 22nd, will more or less function to fill a fairly dead spot in the sports calendar between the NBA and NFL. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m all on board with getting rid of the November Nine and playing the Main down to a winner this summer with only a couple of days’ delay before the final table.
This new PokerGO channel that PokerCentral has created seems okay from the outside, although there are obviously a lot of kinks still to be ironed out. While it’s nice to be able simply to click through and watch (as with PokerStars TV) -- ideal, really -- I’m not too bothered by the subscription model they’ve set up and $10 a month doesn’t seem like a lot to fuss over, as long as the sucker works.
(That said, I’m still waiting for the PayPal option to become functional, as I prefer that route to using a credit card. And I’m looking forward to them getting Roku up and running as they are saying they will, as I’d much rather watch on the teevee than the laptop.)
Still feel like televised (or online streaming) poker remains a super niche form of entertainment, and frankly can’t imagine it being otherwise. There’s always a dream to grow televised poker into something bigger than it is, something resembling or even competing with other sports or entertainment. In other words, something like it was 13-14 years ago, when the televised poker boom first boomed.
That ain’t happening again, of course. But a more modest goal of providing something worth checking out when other desired distractions aren’t available isn’t such a bad one.
I never liked the November Nine. I got used to it, like everyone else. But I never liked the idea.
The World Series of Poker first introduced the “delayed final table” format for the Main Event in 2008, stopping the tournament at nine players in July and restarting it in November. That was also the first summer I went out to help cover the WSOP.
The announcement came at the beginning of May that year, a couple of weeks after I’d already signed on to go out for PokerNews. I remember being disappointed to learn at that late date that I wouldn’t be seeing the Main Event play to a conclusion. I thought the idea to pause a poker tournament for four months was absurd, wildly distorting whatever “standard” might have been established for tournament poker since its rise in popularity.
It’s a little silly, I know, to speak of poker tournaments as a format unable to withstand too much variation. That’s the beauty of poker, of course -- namely, the way the game can accommodate all sorts of imaginative twists and alterations. And in fact, over the last decade we’ve seen an incredible number of different kinds of poker tournaments developed, both live and online, to challenge all sorts of “traditional” ideas of what a poker tournament is or should be.
Tournaments are like novels in that way -- an incredibly elastic “genre” under which heading a seemingly endless array of different kinds of “narratives” can qualify.
But the idea of playing for a week-and-a-half, then waiting four months, then playing another day or two or three was just too much. Even the most experimental novelist would have difficulty selling the idea of presenting 90 percent of the book all at once, then withholding the last couple of chapters until everyone has forgotten the story and characters.
The WSOP and ESPN did what they could with the idea, and by the last couple of years managed to build it into something that was genuinely interesting to follow. Even so, the disconnect between what happened in the Main Event during the summer and how it ended always made it seem more like two, separate “events” than not.
Today -- at an even later date than in 2008 -- we learned the November Nine is finally being scrapped this year. And that there will be a lot of televised coverage in July on both ESPN and PokerCentral, starting with the Day 1 flights and lasting all of the way through to the end. All welcome news, as far as I’m concerned.
Sure, there will be no more coaching and simulations filling those four months in between to challenge ideas of “integrity” and further shape the Main Event into something barely resembling other poker tournaments. Most importantly, though, the story’s momentum won’t be interrupted, which means the building drama over the first seven days of poker will get to continue into the last three days of the final table.
There is still a delay before the final table, but one lasting just two days. Plenty of time, I think, to get to know the players and build some interest and excitement heading into the finale -- like that extra week before the Super Bowl.
After being away a few summers, I’m also plotting a return to the WSOP this time, meaning if all goes as intended I’ll be there to watch this Main Event play out -- all the way out, that is.
I’ll even get to lend a hand when it comes to telling the story of how the sucker ends, too. Finally. Nine years later.
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.
Day 2 of the European Poker Tour Malta Main Event played out today. There were 468 starters in the €5,300 buy-in event (including the few who late regged at the start of play today), and from that group 90 have made it through to Wednesday’s Day 3.
One player who didn’t get to tomorrow was William Kassouf. He started today at the feature table and garnered a bit of time on EPT Live, but busted relatively early in the day in a three-way all-in. Despite the involvement in the hand of another short stack, Vladimir Troyanovskiy, who was in there with pocket deuces, the hand nonetheless uncannily recalled Kassouf’s 17th-place bustout from this summer’s World Series of Poker Main Event, as he once again ran pocket kings into an opponent’s pocket aces (this time Brian Altman was the winner).
I’ve now had a chance to see this week’s ESPN episodes of the WSOP Main Event which carried things down from 21 players to the final nine, setting up the restart that finally comes this Sunday. Many here in Malta have seen them by now, too, or at least the end of Episode 13 featuring Kassouf’s knockout at the hands of Griffin Benger (who went on to make the final nine).
Heard some table talk about the hand and situation surrounding it today, and while it’s all just a tiny anecdotal sampling it does seem as though many are “siding” with Kassouf (if this must be set up as an either/or-type debate, which it shouldn’t be), finding his behavior not nearly as objectionable as that of some of the other players who played with him on that Day 7 this summer, Benger included.
I mentioned a few days ago meeting Kassouf and finding him a friendly, likeable dude. He’s certainly drawn attention to himself in tournaments here with his table talk and gregarious demeanor, but over the course of a long eight- or 10-hour day of poker the “Kassouf experience” it isn’t quite the same as the distilled, highlight reel version shown on ESPN. He’s silent for significant periods when not in hands, and frankly when he does talk it doesn’t seem all that remarkable other than by the contrast he provides with the majority of players who these days choose to remain silent when they play hands.
There was one funny moment late on Day 1b, I recall, when an older French player said to Kassouf that “each ante is... like a movie to you.” The table broke up in laughter, and Kassouf grinningly responded “and you are part of the production!”
Kassouf is obviously very comfortable in the spotlight amid this “star turn” he's found himself taking our strange little poker world. Others have made that observation to me this week, in each case punctuating it with some version of “more power to him” for doing so.
At the start of the ESPN episode that concluded with Kassouf’s knockout and the genuinely startling, emotional eruption by Griffin Benger that preceded it, Lon McEachern and Norman Chad in their introduction once again highlighted Kassouf as the central character of the drama. In fact the show started with a whole montage of Kassouf moments interspersed with an awkward-seeming sit down between him and WSOP Tournament Director Jack Effel.
“Will Kassouf is the most polarizing player of the 21 remaining,” said McEachern, and in his rejoinder Chad ticked off a list of adjectives to describe the British pro: “Too disruptive, too disrespectful, too distasteful, and too damn slow,” said Chad.
Once again making the disclaimer I’ve made before here that all we get is what we see in these sculpted, abbreviated versions of reality shown in each WSOP episode, I can’t say I agree with Chad’s list. Sure, in certain hands he’s been shown to have played “too damn slow.” Whether his play is “disruptive” or not is debatable -- as I’ve said, watching him perform here in Malta, that does not at all seem to be the case. Meanwhile “disrespectful” and “distasteful” seem even further off-base, although I suppose differing views can exist.
The Benger-Kassouf hand was incredibly interesting to watch, though, particularly because Benger had only briefly been covered at all during any of the episodes -- and never playing with Kassouf -- making his transformation in the hand from a silent statue to a raving maniac all the more astonishing to see. Kassouf’s reaction was fascinating as well, as was both players’ trumpeting before the community cards came that it didn’t matter how the hand ended, each felt as though he’d “won.”
If his pocket aces were to be cracked by Kassouf’s kings, says Benger, “it doesn’t matter -- he’s still miserable, I’m happy.” Meanwhile Kassouf says “you can’t take it... you let it get to you, you’re losing it.” Both knew the cards had essentially played themselves in the hand, but they were continuing on with another, different game in which the result of the hand wasn’t relevant.
If you haven’t seen it, someone has carved it out and posted it on YouTube. Even without having sat through the many weeks’ worth of previous episodes, it’s something to see:
In the end, I think neither of the two deserve much criticism here. It was an unusual moment for sure, and poker would be way too stressful to tolerate were it always played this way. But obviously it isn’t, which is why the hand was remarkable.
Back to business here in Malta for tomorrow’s Day 3. Check your privilege if you like, but also check the PokerStars blog.
Been watching the 2016 World Series of Poker Main Event coverage on ESPN again which finally got going a week-and-a-half ago. There have been four episodes thus far, picking up the action on Day 4 (post-bubble) and now already around halfway through Day 5 with just 140 players left.
This week’s episodes featured a ton of table talk, thanks largely to Alex Keating being on the feature table where he was engaging everyone fairly constantly, and William Kassouf drawing the cameras’ attention at other tables.
A bit of buzz this week over Kassouf’s performance, in particular in a couple of hands with Stacy Matuson. Both involved Kassouf pushing all in and putting Matuson to a test for the rest of her stack, and in both cases -- after an avalanche of disorienting chatter from Kassouf -- she folded (once correctly, once after being bluffed).
I remember when these hands happened back in July, in particular the one following which Kassouf was actually given a one-round penalty by WSOP tournament director Jack Effel for “taunting” (as Effel described it).
Following it online at the time over Twitter and then via the hand report on WSOP.com, an admittedly partial view of the affair. Seemed perhaps as though Kassouf must have crossed some not-so-obvious line somewhere with his behavior, but it was hard to say.
The way things were shown on ESPN revealed more of the interaction, but it remains incomplete evidence for those of us who weren’t there. Indeed, even the two hands featured between Kassouf and Matuson are only partially shown, with the action only being picked up postflop when the “speech play” (as Kassouf refers to his table table) began in earnest.
It’s interesting following some of the belated back-and-forthing about it happening thanks to the ESPN coverage finally being shown (here, some two months later). Deservedly or not, Kassouf is clearly being set up to fill the “villain” role for ESPN right through to the final table which starts in late October.
Hard for me to make any profound judgments about those Kassouf-Matuson hands, though, or about how the WSOP staff chose to respond to them. From afar I want to say everything we witnessed is “part of the game” and shouldn’t be proscribed, but who knows, really? Just too much we can’t see or be sure about here -- including a lot of obviously relevant context -- although that doesn’t make the speculating any less interesting.
Kind of like how poker works -- we know what we can see, and have to guess about a lot else.
I have been idly checking in on where things stand in the World Series of Poker Main Event from time to time today. Mainly I’m just noting who is leading and players left, while occasionally being moved to look a little more closely at the updates after noticing someone tweet about the tournament.
As I was talking about earlier in the week, for those not at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino right now, it’s like the entire Main Event is being played in semi-secrecy. Sure, updates and chip counts give us the stats and essentials, but that can be a lot like watching a self-refreshing box score of a live game on the ESPN site or Yahoo! Sports. Or a scrolling stock ticker. Or the clock on your microwave oven ticking down.
Don’t get me wrong -- I’m a huge proponent of “live updates” (or whatever you want to call them) and their centrality to poker tournaments. I’m also a big fan of the folks on site there right now churning them out hour after hour, day after day.
I partly value updates for their historical value and the way they capture and chronicle these very stats and essentials I’m referring to (like a box score). But I also think when done well they enable interesting storytelling, and can even help underscore what makes poker a special game to so many.
I’m remembering writing a post here nearly five years ago in which I was praising good poker reporting. I quoted James McManus making a reference to Al Alvarez and his high-watermark reporting on the WSOP from years ago. In the quote, McManus noted how Alvarez proved a well-crafted “prose account of poker action is quite a bit more exciting than watching the game in person, or even on television with hole cards revealed.”
In that earlier post, I expressed agreement with McManus, although today I’m realizing I’d like to add a qualification to my agreement.
I think when looking back on reporting from a tournament, a rich, detailed narrative recounting hands and other goings-on really can potentially be as engaging and entertaining as any televised broadcast.
That isn’t so much the case for hyper-literal recounting of action minus any color whatsoever (which really is more or less like reading old box scores). But when the updates manage to incorporate elements of strong storytelling -- well-drawn characters, a sense of plot, mindful scene-setting, an interesting style, and so on -- I absolutely believe they can challenge or even exceed the excitement level of televised poker.
Meanwhile, when it comes to following an event as it is happening, the live stream (or “almost live” stream on a slight delay) is always going to be a preferred way to experience a tournament.
Five years ago live streams weren’t nearly as prevalent. Nor were they as trivially easy both to produce and to consume. But today they are the norm, and even small tournaments wishing to attract an audience routinely post some kind of video in order to provide those not on site a way to follow the action.
I’ll make do, as will others who are fans of the game. But we’ll also keep on hoping one year the WSOP will figure out a way to let more people enjoy the early, middle, and penultimate stages of its marquee event as they are playing out.
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.
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 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.
I’ve been spending a little bit of time off and on over the last couple of days watching Jason Somerville’s live streaming from the Aussie Millions over on his Twitch channel. Was up late last night doing other work, and so since the live stuff essentially happens overnight for those of us on Eastern time (and 16 hours behind Melbourne), it provided me a chance to keep the stream on as background.
Because I wasn’t wholly focused on watching the action, I was often just relying on Somerville’s (invariably good) commentary on hands, occasionally clicking on that tab to look up from my work and watch whenever it sounded like something interesting was going on. After a while I realized my own method was kind of emulating that of the players themselves who were playing at the feature table there on Day 2 of the Aussie Millions Main Event.
If you’ve watched any of the streaming, you know to what I’m referring. The action was on a half-hour delay, necessitated by the fact that the the hole cards were being shown. That meant most of those around the table were often looking at their phones at Somerville’s stream, taking advantage of the fact that they could learn more about how their opponents were playing by seeing their hole cards from earlier hands.
In other words, just like my own attention on the action was divided, so, too, was the attention of the players only partly on what was happening at that moment and otherwise focused on what went down a half-hour before, as revealed by the stream.
Somerville’s commentary was also sometimes incorporating the players’ discovery of each other’s hole cards from earlier hands. “It looks like Jeff Gross just found out he successively avoided Julius Colman’s set right before the break,” Somerville once noted as a new hand was being dealt, and when I looked up I saw Gross looking down at his phone while chatting with Colman about the hand.
Indeed, a half-hour before Gross had folded ace-queen following a 10-J-4 flop after Colman had bet (see the pic above), saying as he did he suspected Colman had pocket jacks. Now, watching the stream (see at left), Gross was discovering Colman indeed had a set, though with pocket tens.
I got to thinking about how it is a bit of work for the players to catch those moments on the stream, and of course if they’re involved in a new hand that distracts them further from following the action from a half-hour before. Also, it was clear that while most of the players at the table were checking their phones, not everyone was, and so that added another variable when it came to the information-gathering.
Would probably be best just to have the stream running on a screen near the table, much like the tournament clock. Not saying it’s a must (nor wanting to reengage the same old arguments about fairness and televised/streamed poker), although perhaps for final tables -- like, say, at the WSOP Main Event -- it should be considered.
Some tournament should try it, at least, just as an experiment. I’m sure it would get some attention, anyway. Or at least whatever attention most of us had left to give it while we were doing other things.
Was listening to last week’s PokerNews podcast today -- not the most recent one, but the “November Nine Recap” one in which Donnie Peters and Rich Ryan broke down the World Series of Poker Main Event final table (Episode #343).
Besides discussing all the key moments from Joe McKeehen’s dominating win, the pair got into some other related topics as well including considering suggestions for improving the WSOP Main Event going forward and whether or not the November Nine experiment has run its course after eight years’ worth of delayed final tables.
Near the very end they played a voice mail from a listener referring back to Donnie’s live tweeting during the final table, and from there came a short discussion of the whole “spoilers” topic. Donnie was one of a few folks tweeting live from the Rio that night, which meant those watching the coverage on the ESPN networks (on a half-hour delay) needed to mute or unfollow those Tweeters if they didn’t want to know ahead of time what they were about to see.
I tried to mute everyone who like Donnie warned they’d be tweeting “spoilers” during the WSOP Main Event final table. It almost worked except for once when someone retweeted a knockout before it had shown up on the teevee (argh!).
I thought of that conversation again just now while watching the World Poker Tour’s live stream of the final table of the WPT Montreal event from the Playground Poker Club. There, too, one can enjoy “cards up” coverage on a half-hour delay. (Side note: The WPT stream shows all players’ hole cards, not just players voluntarily putting chips in the middle like they’ve been doing with the WSOP ME final table. The WSOP should be showing everyone’s cards, too, I think, for the sake of fairness.)
Anyhow, you run into a similar “spoiler” issue following live updates from the event on the WPT site alongside the live stream, as the hand reports are a half-hour ahead of what is being shown. They’re also tweeting live updates about the final table from @WPTLive, which means you can’t follow that and watch the stream without being told about things ahead of time as well. (E.g., that bold five-bet shove by Brian Altman with pocket fours pictured above was partially signaled a half-hour ahead of time via the Twitter feed.)
Just now on the WPT feed play was delayed for a couple of moments while Mike Sexton, Vince Van Patten, and Lynn Gilmartin could be heard adding some commentary for the edited version of the final table that will be shown later -- a phenomenon I wrote about here once before following a WPT final table I helped cover. Kind of wild to think of the many different ways the WPT is covering their event all at once -- live, on a half-hour delay, then yet again in a different, edited way on longer delay.
Over on the European Poker Tour, the issue is handled pretty effectively via an embargo (of sorts) on reporting ahead of the delayed live stream. That can’t prevent non-media folks from tweeting out what’s happening, but the system works pretty well. It also kind of “unifies” the coverage with the live updates, the features on the PokerStars blog, the EPT Live stream, and all of the coverage appearing on other online outlets all operating in tandem rather than one “spoiling” things for any of the others.
I really enjoy watching live streams, and I also like being on social media to share the experience (such as when the WSOP Main Event final table is playing out). Indeed, as I observed last week when discussing the slowness of the WSOP ME FT, the pace of the game with its frequent pauses makes it well-suited to be combined with something like Twitter where spectators can share impressions as they watch. But “cards up” coverage can’t be provided without a delay, which necessarily introduces the possibility for “spoiler” situations.
I like the EPT’s attempt to solve the conundrum. Is there any other way to do so?
The last of ESPN’s pre-November Nine episodes from the 2015 World Series of Poker Main Event have now aired, and now everyone’s attention turns to the final table -- finally! -- which will begin this coming Sunday.
I ended up watching all 16 of the episodes which altogether added up to 19-and-a-half hours’ worth of shows on the ESPN networks. That counts commercials, of course, which I skipped through like most. I didn’t watch a single one of these shows live, choosing the NFL instead (usually) as just about every one of the premieres went up against football.
The coverage started with the beginning of Day 4 (after the money bubble had already burst on Day 3) and carried through the end of Day 7, taking viewers from 661 players down to nine. I enjoyed most of the shows, especially from Day 7. Daniel Negreanu’s deep run definitely helped -- he was a huge part of all of the episodes right up until the last half-hour of the last one.
It’s been at least a couple of years, perhaps three or four, since I actually sat down and watched every episode of ESPN’s WSOP Main Event coverage like this. Again, I can’t say they have done too much to alter the formula, which is probably on the whole a good thing even if one would like to think there are better ways of doing this sort of thing.
Seven years later, the final table delay still irks me. Negreanu’s desperate hanging on with the short stack before finally getting knocked out in 11th -- on a river card, too -- would have been utterly electric to watch live (or on a slight delay). But seeing it three-and-a-half months later was nowhere close to as exciting. (Even a far cry from the “Twitter rail” from that night in July.)
That other World Series wrapping up earlier this week got me thinking about how I experienced baseball as a kid. The first World Series I can remember watching was in 1977 when the Yankees beat the Dodgers in six games and Reggie Jackson hit five home runs -- three in the final game. What a thrilling series that was between two incredible teams full of characters and stars. And many of the games and plays remain etched in my memory, even decades later.
Meanwhile I was a Cincinnati Reds fan as a kid, and so I only indirectly was able to enjoy the Big Red Machine’s two wins in ’75 and ’76 after the fact via highlights, reading books and magazine articles, and so on. While I obviously can recall the image of Carlton Fisk urging his game-winner in Game 6 in ’75 to stay fair, I don’t remember much of anything else from those two series given the indirect way I originally “experienced” them.
It’s this latter way that we now experience nearly all of the World Series of Poker Main Event, save the final table. It’s a highlight show, and with such a huge distance between it happening and our getting to see anything it tends to pack the same, generally weak punch of seeing a few plays the morning after on SportsCenter. If that.
That said, I’ll confess watching all the shows definitely has me ready for Sunday night. I might even have to turn off the football for once.
By the way, if you want to play along with my series of "what-would-you-do?"-type strategy articles over on PokerNews stemming from the ESPN coverage (with poll questions about decision points), here are all of them:
Saw our friend Kevmath tweeting a little earlier about viewers for last night’s initial two episodes from ESPN of their 2015 World Series of Poker Main Event coverage.
I was watching ESPN last night, although not the WSOP. Looking over at Sports TV Ratings’ numbers from Monday night, I was part of the group of 13.56 million watching the night’s first NFL game (Philadelphia at Atlanta) as well as part of the 14.33 million looking in on the second one (Minnesota at San Francisco).
The episodes of the WSOP aired over on ESPN2 at 8 and 9 p.m. Looks like 245,000 were watching that first hour, then 414,000 tuned in for the second hour.
Instead of watching live, I DVR’d the poker and watched this afternoon. Was entertaining, I thought, in large part because of Phil Hellmuth being on the feature table for the entire two hours, then Daniel Negreanu getting seated there for the last 45 minutes or so of hour no. 2.
I also liked the snippets of talk from various players talking about what it meant to play the Main. That helped broaden things in such a way that it was possible to think of the larger context for the various hands that were shown. (Otherwise, it was hard -- as usual -- to think about how the tournament as a whole was going.)
Speaking of the number of people watching, at the end of one hand during the first part of the first hour, Hellmuth made a reference to his hand after being folded to, and when asked if he was telling the truth he said if he weren’t he’d “just lied in front a million people.”
Then he recalculated.
“Gonna be five million people watching this, at least.”
I believe last year’s Main Event final table -- the “almost live” November Nine, that is -- drew something like 1.15 million viewers, with the episodes leading up to it drawing considerably fewer. About a month ago I looked up some of these stats, finding that the 2008 WSOP ME final table had 2.364 million watching (the most of the Nov. 9 era).
This old PokerNews article from a decade ago lists some stats for ESPN’s WSOP episodes from back in the glory days. The article says in 2003 the average was 1 million viewers (for those seven Main Event episodes), in 2004 it was 1.5 million (for 22 hrs. of coverage, including non-ME shows), and in 2005 it was 1.1 million (for 32 hrs. of coverage).
No surprise to find that five million people watching a poker show didn’t happen even at the height of the poker boom. Nor is it to hear Hellmuth imagining five million are watching him.
There’s a new thread on 2+2 decrying the level of play at the conclusion of the 1987 WSOP Main Event as evidenced by 43-minute video of the final table you can watch on YouTube.
It’s an interesting final table, with Bob Ciaffone, Howard Lederer, Dan Harrington, and eventual winner Johnny Chan among the final six. If you click on the link to watch, you’ll see the first few minutes taken up with introductions of the scene and players, then a quick primer on how to play no-limit Texas hold’em.
Those little instructional segments continued to appear as part of the ESPN broadcasts of the WSOP up through the start of the “boom,” although looking back I think by 2005 they’d already dropped them. At least I don’t see it at the start of the first episode from that year’s Main Event.
By the way, I was just distracted by that opening show from the 2005 ME, highlighted by Jennifer Harman losing with queens full to Cory Zeidman’s straight flush (a river one-outer), some laugh-out-loud hilarity from Brad Garrett, Greg Raymer’s red-hot start where he picked up hand after hand and was consistently paid off, and 90-year-old Victor Goulding making quads in one hand then a little later being given a 10-minute penalty for cursing (no shinola).
(Also interesting, both John Duthie and Vicky Coren are shown playing hands in the episode, yet neither are identified. In fact, Coren is sitting next to Goulding and was involved in his quads hand -- was Victor v. Victoria.)
The instructional segments went away, of course, as more and more started playing poker -- many playing no-limit hold’em exclusively -- and it became apparent such explanations were mostly superfluous. Watching those segments today sparks a bit of nostalgia, while also calling to mind the effect they had back when we first saw them.
For those of us who already knew what a flop, turn, and river were, the segments were perhaps a bit tedious to sit through, but I’m realizing today how they might have served as confidence-builders to some (or many?).
Hearing someone explain something that you already know all about produces at least a couple of by-products, I think. One is a kind of self-affirmation, especially when the explanation checks out in all particulars with your own understanding. A second is the suggestion that someone actually needs the explanation -- i.e., that there are those whose level of understanding doesn’t match your own.
In other words, while the how-to segments might have been designed primarily to help non-players understand the game they are watching, and secondarily as a way of encouraging some of them to give the game a try, they also certainly provided a measure of encouragement to those already familiar with the game.
And as far as the level of play (by some) in those old shows is concerned, that, too, was certainly encouraging to many as well.
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.
