Poker Moth

Man, it’s been a while since I basked in the reflected glory of Pokertube. Possibly because there hasn’t been that much quality poker telly to write about of late?

UNTIL NOW, that is. I direct your attention to the magnificent Aurrrrt-zee Millions Cash Game 2009, probably the best bit of poker-watchy you’ll see in a long time. There are links at the bottom of the post, but first! Some words.

Americans can’t say “Aussie”. (Or “Craig”. Or “bloody wanker”). They can say “Ozzy”, as in Osbourne, but seem to be incapable of making the exact same sounds when spelled slightly differently.  Barry Tompkins, (who plays Presenting Man on the show), is particularly bad at saying Aussie, which I mentioned in passing when I reviewed the first Aussie Millions , back in 2007.This hasn’t changed.

I also mentioned Michael Konik’s obsession with the word “prohibitive”. This has changed, because Konik has been replaced by Bart Hanson, who does an extremely good job of calling the action, but is obsessed with the word “bluffcatcher”, to the point where I started to think he was subliminally advertising some ghastly product of that name. As if that wasn’t enough, the sensation of being subtly reprogrammed to buy BLUFFCATCHER products is heightened by a truly bizarre addition to the AM format – background music. Weird, wobbly, vaguely hippyish ambient background music, of the sort you’d expect to hear in a Scientology Org while they wave an e-meter around and size up your wallet. Then there’s the sound effects; every card the dealer turns over sets off a whooshy burst of white  noise , and every bet triggers the “mobile phone receiving a text message” alert. It’s disorientating; your eyes see poker, while your ears hear “Channel Five daytime quiz show”.

Happily, the poker itself is fantastic. There are two shows; the first is a full ring game, featuring the likes of Durrrr, Antonius, Laak, the excellent Niki Jedlicka and the truly awful Andrew Robl, and some Australian guy (mercifully not the one with the sodding crocodile), and the second episode is a heads up match between Durrrr and Antonius, who are clearly deeply in love with each other. (Get a room, guys! Oh, you did). And the stacks are DEEP; the minimum buy-in for the ring game is $200,000 (they don’t specify whether those are USD or AUD, I suspect the former), but Durrrr and Antonius decide to bring seven figure sums with them. I forget exactly how much Antonius is playing, but it’s something like $2,000,000. They sit down for the heads up match with $1,000,000 and $1,500,000 respectively.

Better yet, it’s a mixed  game; NLHE and (joy!) PLO. I’m delighted to see Omaha being played on the telly, and it doesn’t disappoint here; there’s one hand in particular which has to be seen to be believed, and several other merely fascinating hands. There’s also some spectacularly inept commentary from Tompkins in the heads up match, which… well, I’ll not spoiler it for you. Links below, and I’ll post some thoughts in the comments.

Watch it. It’s superb.

Episode 1 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Episode 2 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

A trio of teaser trailers for HSPS5 have appeared on Pokertube. Observe! With your eyes!

(Clearly, if you don’t want this stuff spoilered, don’t read).

CLIP THE FIRST: In which Kaplan and Benza kick things off by reminding us that the show’s really about their hilarious double act. Then, Tom Dwan and Peter Eastgate play a fairly dull pot, and Doyle Brunson pretends to be surprised that they are playing weak hands.
http://www.pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=9254

CLIP THE SECOND: In which Eastgate and Dwan play a more interesting pot where “Ice-Gate” demonstrates the skills that made him World Champion, and Tom Dwan pulls a funny face.
http://www.pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=9224

CLIP THE THIRD: In which Phil Laak flirts with Patrik Antonius.
http://www.pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=9208

So, what have we learned? They’ve increased the blinds. Presumably that means the minimum buy-in is higher. We see several usual suspects, plus everybody’s favourite maniacs, Durrr and Ziigmund, Peter “World Champion, no, really” Eastgate, and, err, Sam Simon?

Oh, lol. According to his Wiki page, Simon used to be married to Jennifer Tilly. I do hope he’s playing with Laak.

I AM MORE EXCITED THAN I WAS BEFORE, WHICH WAS VERY EXCITED. YES.

American television’s pretty good at the moment. There’s 30 Rock, which is good, and then there’s Lost, which is, frankly, unimaginably brilliant. I could talk for hours about just how awesome Lost is, and just how smug I feel about the deluded saps who gave up on the show in the early stages because “it’s never going to be resolved”, because they were SO VERY WRONG and the show isn’t just being resolved, but being resolved in the most mindfuckingly brilliant ways imaginable, and…

…oh, yeah. The point of this post. The point of this post IS – it’s nearly the 1st of March, and that’s the date when American telly gets EVEN BETTER. First of all, it’s the return of US Celebrity Apprentice, which only needs to be half as entertaining as the last series to qualify as essential viewing. Secondly, and more relevantly…

Season Five of High Stakes Poker, baby.

Yep, the slowest show in the history of televised poker is BACK. Here’s a little reminder of what makes it great -

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojeRwWIdQBM&hl=en&fs=1]

Strangely, GSN haven’t done a website for this series, so official information about what to expect is thin on the ground. I’ve heard rumours that there’ll be Pot Limit Omaha, which is excellent in theory, but we’ve barely gotten to the point where pokertelly producers feel able to broadcast Hold’em without explaining the rules every thirty seconds, so god knows how tedious Kaplan and Benza will be if they have to deal with Omaha. And other than that – who knows?

One quick quote from the GSN forum thread on HSP, before I go. The part in italics is the guy’s signature…

Poker is a game just for a fun, however most of them are doing gambling in the poker game it is not correct.Recently my friend lost money in the poker game due to gambling such persons who are doing gambling in the game must be punished.
_______________________________
Duke Glasgow
Play The Poker League Today, the Poker League is Challenging, and Fun, for players at all levels with Added Cash and FREE Bonus Seats to Live Poker Tornaments Worldwide in 28 Selected Weekly Guaranteed MTT Tournaments, 4 Games a Day 7 Days a Week with a yearly prize pool of over €17 Million .

http://www.CelebPoker.com

Owoosay, lol?

Last week’s PAD has just been uploaded to Pokertube, and while you wouldn’t call it a classic, as such, it’s a great little tournament. As ever, there’s a theme; last week was “Heckler’s Week”, which translates into “Loudmouth Week”; Gavin Smith (fresh from winning the previous week’s show while pissed out of his face), Sam Grizzle, Jean-Robert Bellande, Mike Matusow, Sean Sheikhan, and Phil Hellmuth. It’s a lot of fun, and ends in a very silly heads up battle which is well worth seeing.

Season 3 Episode 13 Part 1
Season 3 index

High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker. All you ever hear (on this blog, at least) is High Stakes Poker. So I thought I should pay some credit to the only other really good poker show on the planet. BBC2’s Food Poker!

Alright, no. Let us instead celebrate NBC’s Poker After Dark (as Food Poker’s rubbish, and inexplicably not on Pokertube). PAD’s format is pretty simple, and there’s no cooking involved; six players buy-in for $20k and play a winner-takes-all SNG. This is shown in five programmes every weeknight. And why is it great?

It’s great because of Oliver “Ali” Nejad, the king of poker commentary. Shhh! Can you hear him?

…

No. Because Nejad isn’t saying anything. He’s waiting until he sees something worth commentating on. He’s not telling you what the players at the table are saying, because he knows that if he keeps his mouth shut, you’ll be able to hear them for yourself. He’s not riffing his way through one of his favourite tortured poker analogies for the thousandth time. He’s certainly not trying to make you laugh. And he’s not a celebrity DJ who’s stumbled into the studio by accident and is now attempting to pass his cluelessness off as an endearing character flaw. He’s Oliver Nejad, and he’s going to keep his mouth shut until he has something worth saying. He’s a legend, is what I’m saying.

Nejad’s so good, it doesn’t even matter that he has a fairly annoying voice. You rarely hear it. I sometimes get the impression that he’s busy doing something else at the same time; reading a really good book, perhaps, or playing poker online. Every now and then, he looks up and says “Doyle’s raised it up with an inside straight draw”, and he’s done for another five minutes.

Meanwhile, the players natter away, and the action unfolds at it’s own pace. The show’s five-episodes-a-week format provides plenty of room for the action to develop, and although it’s not as sedentary as High Stakes Poker (where three hands can take up an entire episode), the end product is… well, soothing. Poker happens, and Nejad lets it.

I’m a fan, basically.

Season One
Season Two
Season Three

As mentioned earlier, there’s not been much poker played round these parts of late. I had intended to get back to the virtual felt today, but a truly spectacular hangover put paid to that plan. So, in lieu of anything else to write about, it’s time for another Pokertube review. It’s coming. Any second now. Wait for it…

Christ alive, my head hurts.

SO. Whereas the last PT Review was about a gimmicky lifestyle show, this is a proper, competitive offering, which comes in two parts. There’s the Aussie Millions main event, of course, but that’s no longer considered enough in the modern poker broadcasting era, so we also get two episodes devoted to a HSP-aping side game. I’m fairly sure that this will become standard practice in poker broadcasting soon enough; tournaments are messy things where you can end up with a final table full of unknowns, so it behooves the networks to set up a side game where they can fill the seats with big names to get some guaranteed sleb-poker action.

As it happens, they needn’t have bothered in this instance, because the final table of the main event is considerably more interesting than the side game. Not only do we get a decent smattering of name players at the FT, but the action is more entertaining; the cash game is rather quiet and cagey, and, without spoilering too much, the main focus is the obligatory amateur, a Japanese businessman who seems to unsettle the assembled star names, leading to a tense encounter. It’s not terrible viewing, but there’s none of that HSP magic here.

Still, that’s just two episodes of moderately tedious poker; the eight episodes covering the Main Event are much, much more interesting. I won’t go into details, but the producers have done a good job of filling those eight shows with watchable poker.

There’s also some decent commentary; Barry Tompkins (TV Guy) and Michael Konik (Cardplaying Guy) do the honours, and they do a better job than most of their contemporaries. That said, that’s not so hard: I could train a Cabbage Patch Doll to be a better poker commentator than most. But the worst criticisms I can make of Bazza and Mike are fairly pathetic; Tompkins can’t say “Aussie” properly, and Konik is obsessed with the word “prohibitive”. The former is grating, the latter plain weird, but neither’s causing too much trouble.

The main irritation comes from the ESPN-style presentation (in fact, this may well be an ESPN production; if it’s not, the producers have gone out of their way to ape the WSOP broadcast format). You know the form – you see two hands played, then it’s away to a celebrity montage, where Phil, Mike, Dan and co line up to tell us all about the longest session of poker they’ve played, or to share their thoughts on a lesser known player, or (the very worst part) take part in a regular feature where they get to guess the meaning of obscure Australian dialect phrases. Then, it’s back to the featured table for two more hands of boring old poker.

Don’t get me wrong – I like these guys. They’re entertaining people. But do I really need to know whether Gavin Smith can guess the meaning of the word cackleberry? Turns out the answer’s no. Sorry, that’s wrong. The answer’s FUCK NO.

But buried in between all of that guff is a superb poker tournament; if you’ve exhausted all the High Stakes Poker excellence that Pokertube has to offer, this is a pretty good substitute.

Aussie Millions 2007
Aussie Millions Cash Game

Hey hey – it’s a new poker show!
Pokertube: Ace In The House.

Ever seen the Television Executives sketches from The Armando Iannucci Show? (Alas, no Youtube clip). This is one of those poker shows. It’s got ordinary people in it. It’s got a concept. We’re so good at telly! We’re so good at telly!

Oh, yeah. The concept. Take one ordinary home game, and add a big name pro. (Mike Matusow gets bussed in for the first game in the series, unsurprisingly – no doubt Negreanu and Hellmuth will follow). The big name pro and the little people play an STT in someone’s living room, with the winner getting $10,000.

And, you know, it’s not a terrible format in theory, but the execution’s ropey. It’s a forty-ish minute show, and a hefty chunk of that is given over to the preamble; first we meet the ordinaries, giving their little biogs to camera – here’s the guy who thinks he’s a shark, here’s his girlfriend. Then we get to see Matusow being shown the same clips, just so we can get his opinion on which nobody he’ll bust first. The upshot of all this is that the action is more heavily edited than usual; most of the ordinaries get to feature in one hand, and one hand only.

When the cards finally get dealt, the other problem with the show announces itself; it’s another overly chatty commentator who suffers from Gabe Kaplan Syndrome (i.e. he talks too much, mainly to tell you what the players at the table are saying, which wouldn’t be necessary if he stopped talking over them). Mr. Commentator has an educational remit, which means he devotes plenty of time to explaining how brilliant the pro’s plays are, and how poor the amateurs are. Not so different from most poker shows, then, but irritating all the same.

Despite that, the format has potential; with the right pro (Matusow, for instance), it’s still perfectly watchable. The big problem with episode one is the ordinaries; for some reason, Mike gets to play against an Argos version of the cast of Friends; irritating media types with stupid hats and too many teeth. Maybe I’m just prejudiced against toothy attractive young people; YMMV, but I’d imagine most viewers will be rooting for the lovable pro.

SO, IN SUMMARY, THEN: It could be worse, it may well get better, but there’s nothing special going on here. Just another average poker show, I’m afraid.

The Poker Moth: watching everything on Pokertube so you don’t have to.