I used to love watching poker tournaments on TV in the olden days. Granted you didn’t get to see them as often because poker wasn’t as popular as it is now.
My memory may be faulty but I don’t remember the players being so douchy as they are now. I can’t stand to watch it anymore.
I’ve decided what mostly makes the players over douchy is their attire. The ones I always root for to win are the ones who don’t sit perfectly still trying to look stoic and avoid any movement lest they give something away.
I would tune in all the time if they outlawed hats and sunglasses (or any other face covering). While we’re at it, it wouldn’t bother me to have the players wear short sleeve t-shirts of a solid color. I want to watch the game, not the attention seeking behavior of the players.
Haha, depending upon if this touches a nerve with some of you I could see this being better suited as a thread for the pit.
What do you guys think? How would you improve the game?
I definitely agree that they need to outlaw hats and sunglasses. It’s not that fun looking at someone covering half their face. Let me see if the guy is bugging his eyes out, twitching, etc.
My guess, which I fully admit is pulled out of my ass:
In the “olden days”, which is to say the first year or two that poker really started to get huge mainstream TV coverage, you still were looking mostly at fields of pros. Guys - even more so than now, nearly always guys - who made their living by playing live games in Vegas or AC or Europe or whatever. I’d suggest that this led to more consistent concentrations of interesting personalities than you see now, when such a huge portion of the players at the World Series play primarily online, or at least got their introduction to the game that way. Some of the online guys are great fun to watch live, but much like poker itself, it’s an odds game: if you go from 60-70% “interesting” players to 30-40%, you’re going to have “interesting” tables much less consistently.
How do you fix it? (Do you accept that it even needs to be fixed?) That’s a lot more difficult. Getting rid of hats/sunglasses/headphones/whatever might help, but it would piss a lot of people off, too. And maybe you just end up ‘revealing’ the personality of people who aren’t that interesting. Changes to the structure of the tournament to induce more action shift the balance between luck and skill, which again might be more entertaining for a viewer, but would not be seen as desirable by most players.
I dunno, it’s a hard problem to attack. I didn’t miss an episode of the Moneymaker year and the couple years after that, but I follow it much more casually now. I’m not a hardcore poker fan, though: I’ll play a house game once a month for super-low stakes, and I’ll put down a couple hundred at a casino room once a year. Appealing to viewers like me is a big part of TV ratings success, though…
Go back to individual-hand games without all the cheese-puff special rules and nomenclature.
THE is like a version of boxing where there’s a special name for each finger and each participant has to open with a tap from “Georgie” before he can get extra points from the “Freddie-Sammy” combination.
Phil Laak and Chris Ferguson both wear sunglasses and head coverings, but there’s clearly a huge difference in their approach, at least on TV.
If you’re looking for interesting, the Poker After Dark approach is probably the best, where they invited who they wanted, and the prize money wasn’t all that massive. Get six personalities who know each other and are competing for $120K and you’ll likely get better interaction and banter than a huge field of qualifiers that results in a final table of mostly people who’ve never been on TV before trying to get to a $1.5 million prize or more.
All I ever see is one final table of some WPT tournaments on Fox Sports, repeated at least three times a week until a new one comes out Sunday nights. Three or four years ago, there were at least two poker shows nearly every night of the week. Some nights I could see three hours, but not anymore. Two hours a week is a big come down from 12+ hours a week a few years ago.
BTW, I did catch the 2013 November Nine last week, but I had to stay up until 4 AM to do so.
I think that the ESPN coverage of the WSOP changed over the years. At the start of the big rise in attention, they mainly covered what was going on in the tournament and focused on important or interesting hands. Since they only had a few shows to cover the entire tournament, they were able to make interesting shows.
As they increased the coverage, they needed more content to fill the time since a lot of the hands start to look the same after a while. So they started to focus on the personalities. Unfortunately, most of the personalities were borderline (or up-and-up) assholes, like Mike Matusaw or Phil Helmuth. A lot of the players started to realize that their airtime could increase by being a bit outrageous.
So, in my opinion, it went from covering a poker tournament to covering a bunch of annoying people playing in a poker tournament. I don’t watch much anymore, so it may have become less annoying.