Spoiler alert: there aren’t any.
Last week, I tuned in online for the live broadcast of some random European Poker Tour tournament (I lead an exciting life). It was essentially like looking over a balcony and watching strangers below. Within 10 minutes, I had forgotten the tab was even loaded on my browser, as the monotony of staring at the top of unfamiliar player’s heads like I was looking down upon them from Google Earth while they played at the rate of a hand being dealt every two minutes took its toll on my patience. It left me wondering: had my life really come to this?
It’s logistically impossible to televise poker live any other way than in the dark, which deduces it to an aerial view of the table and third-rate commentators who drive the play-by-play with educated (and uneducated) reads, attempts at humor, stories that go nowhere, and filling us in once cards flip over that are too small for us to see from a view which feels as if we’re on a Virgin Atlantic flight. The dealer deals, players come and go talking to their friends, and you can occasionally play “Guess What the Poker Pro is Eating.” That’s it.
I mean, poker isn’t a spectator sport. Much like Nascar, it shouldn’t be considered a sport at all. Both share the fact that things happen in circles and each is completely mindless to watch, as you can witness that something is happening before you but never quite understand why. You’re not going to find people anytime soon buying a hot dog and a beer to sit down on a Sunday afternoon to take in people playing poker because they would either be playing it themselves or doing something better with their lives. All the fun stems from being able to see what players are holding, like watching a horror movie where you’re shouting at the screen because you know what’s behind that cabin door, as the horny, hapless summer camp instructors get slaughtered by the man in the mask. You can sit back and watch the drama unfold, watch players take the game to new heights with stellar plays and reads, witness the bad beats in real-time.
A few weeks back, The Big Game came to a close, a tournament which saw Victor Ramdin beating Joe Hachem heads-up for $500,000. There is no better way for a tourney to end, with two big league pros vying for a title. There is a better way to watch it though, and as their camera crew realized, that’s with hole cards. After an hour and a half delay from the event’s completion to the airing of the broadcast on the Bicycle Casino website, the final table was aired complete with card cams. While this procedure is nothing new–the World Series of Poker scrambles to piece together the Main Event final table in similar fashion–a matter of a couple of hours added worth and legitimacy to something that, without hole cards, would have been no different than tuning into a traffic camera’s broadcast of a busy intersection online (and in my experience, far less exciting). This is the closest thing we’ll ever see to “live” cards, and unfortunately, and it will never manage to be close enough.
My point is that in its current state, televised live poker will never be more than noise in the background. It’s like a webcam but minus the fun of the nudity. There is no point to its existence and certainly no more room for it in my spare time. Has the obsession with televised poker come to a point where we need fixes in between the broadcasts that riddle late-night television to assuage our all-in DTs? My immediate answer is no, as well as my long-term one.
