Back in April the Global Poker League started. Its aim was to “sportify poker” but sportifying in the American sense, where teams have silly nicknames and a league system that’s a bit obtuse (with good mainstream sounding words like “conference”). Designed as a mixture of online and live events the season was meant to culminate at Wembley this Tuesday by playing a game set inside a large perspex cube.
Or at least that was meant to be the case. But predictably nobody actually bothered with it, it seems to have made no impact whatsoever, despite a soft relaunch after the Summer. The competition now ends next week in Las Vegas in a cube that doesn’t look nearly as exciting as the one promised at the start of the season (in fact it looks like they’ve dropped the live game aspect totally in favour of heads-up “battleships” style poker).
Poker, especially the televised sort, has an image problem. If you don’t know the game very well there’s no clear “in” – the characters that popularized the game in twenty years ago are no longer there, all the online players that dominate the game these days are clean cut, boring or both, taking a game that is ultimately about divining sequences of cards way too seriously to pique anybody’s interest. Even when people people might have actually heard of win a big tournament the world collectively shrugs, do you remember that poker boom Victoria Coren-Mitchell’s second EPT win was meant to herald? Still waiting. Even in its easiest to follow form, Texas Hold ’em, it’s still quite a complex game. Whereas before people could pick it up off the telly by being immersed in the world, these days there’s no real pull.
Or perhaps I am wrong. I used to be well into the game, watching it whenever it was on telly, playing two-three tournaments a week, these days I might play two or three tourneys a month, since moving flat a few years ago I don’t have the expendable income I used to, although the game has dried up locally too. I certainly barely seek it out to watch any more either.
Let’s tie this up with quiz. I wrote a thing about why they’ll never be a great quiz poker show on telly a while ago and I recently re-read it. But first, a clip of a show that really goes for it, Duell um die Geld. The question is “what is the total sum of all of Adele’s albums?”
The post is here but I’m going to reproduce the main body anyway:
The other night I was informed of a Circus Halligalli special, Das Duell um Die Geld (it’s kind of a pun on another show they do, Joko and Klass’ Das Duell um De Weld) and I tuned in live, it was another attempt at the game show holy grail the quiz poker variant. As a poker player I realised a while ago that it’s really hard to make a convincing poker quiz show so I thought I’d try and articulate (badly) why.
Basing a quiz around the structure of a poker tournament initially looks like a great idea – there’s constant jeopardy and a clear beginning, middle and end game. Rising stakes.
However everybody makes the same mistake of trying to base it on Texas Hold ’em. Hold ’em is a variant that works great on telly because it’s fast, there’s action and there isn’t much the viewer needs to keep track of – just two cards for each player and whatever is in the middle. It’s pretty easy to work out what the best hand is at any given point. There is potential for shock results.
Unfortunately it is very not the case that you can just stick a nearest-to question to the formula of Hold ’em and hope for the best. If you’re watching coverage of poker on telly it’s pretty easy to hide or edit the admin – the blind posting and minor rules, this is much more difficult to do on a televised quiz, and people hate watching admin.
Pretty routinely you get your question, a round of betting, a hint (your flop, if you like), a round of betting, another hint, another round, the answer, another round then reveal. The issue here is that this is not actually very exciting to watch – extra cards mean extra possibilities and extra ways to take a hand down, all hints do is narrow down the possible range, there’s no real chance of an exciting twist river and no real opportunity to bluff – because of the nature of the questions if you’re pretty close you’re likely to stick around no matter what, the chance of an amazing bluff, an amazing read, an amazing put down or an amazing outdraw are zero and none. If quiz hold ’em worked like real hold ’em, you’d write an answer down before you even knew what the question was.
Because quiz poker is necessarily quite a slow game (because good telly demands build ups and big gestures when betting, for example) by necessity you’re probably only likely to get 10-15 questions in. If you played an actual poker tournament that was designed to finish in 10-15 hands you’d think it was a waste of money. By design everyone would be all-in every hand three-quarters into the show. That might make for some exciting television, but it’s not really poker and if you’ve come this far why bother with the poker at all?
This poker quiz show celebrates its 20th anniversary next year:
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_het_Mes_op_Tafel
I like it, but it takes the concepts of poker whilst not really being poker. I’ve never seen an outstanding bluff on it because you’re limited by what you can do.
It has also not really travelled.
Actually I liked Poker Face as well.
I still impressed by how Poker Face’s face-off/folding rounds were consistently exciting, it’s rare to find a mechanic in a show that is tense in almost every instance of it. It’s a shame that the question answering wasn’t as good.
Disclosure: I am involved with the Twitch Poker scene, but I’m not affiliated to the GPL or associated entities. All of the following is public domain knowledge.
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I would say that televised poker worked off three things – big names, big money and sponsorship. PartyPoker, PokerStars and Full Tilt all had a considerable stable of programs – and it worked because it drew (casual) players to their respective sites, particularly from the US.
When Black Friday happened in the US, it caused a seismic shift in the market – most operators lost considerable player volume, others shut down and some went bust (including the original Full Tilt – allegedly with a $300m black hole in its finances). The viability of TV shows such as the Million Dollar Challenge or High Stakes Poker evaporated overnight – and they disappeared from our screens.
In the five years since, the fragmentation of the global pool hasn’t helped matters – for example France, Spain, Italy becoming segregated; Portugal and other EU countries making a mess of their licensing and Australia currently debating eliminating online poker
While the “live event” coverage – such as the European Poker Tour – continued, it could only ever provide so much… the slower pace of play combined with the random nature of tables meant that it would be difficult to find a “fun table” to broadcast. Cards-Down coverage further dampened the interest.
Three years later, the start of Twitch Poker…
With the loss of televised poker, people looked to YouTube for their content – at this stage mostly reruns of Poker After Dark, live events, or similar content. In 2014, Twitch allowed poker streams and signed a deal with Jason Somerville to start streaming on the site.
Fast forward a couple of years and while there are a few hundred regular streamers, the audience is still incredibly linear – the top stream regularly draws 50% of the total audience. A big name will not necessarily draw a big audience either…
The dynamics are rather different as well – interaction is key, but there are significant delays to protect game integrity. Some streamers have tried low-delay, cards-down coverage but this has been frequently dismissed as not interesting.
Enter Stage Left, the GPL…
It was a lofty ambition to “sportify poker” with a “brand new format” – the live final at Wembley Arena intending to cement that ascension. Nearly 9,000 concurrents watched the opening stream – hosted by Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu – and it set a great benchmark to build from.
Unfortunately the benchmark became the peak – early technical issues, problematic commentary (the obsession with being “new” or “the first” – often when they weren’t) and the lack of interaction with the players put a lot of people off. Some were fixed quickly, others continued to plague the broadcast…
The major unanswered question on day one was the event structure – and it became apparent when it was released there was a big problem. The smaller number of teams (12) didn’t justify such an elaborate structure (174 matches played over six months) – particularly when 8 of them would progress to the Grand Final in the autumn and there were no intermediate prizes to be won.
As it turned out, the last matches were vital for seven of the twelve teams – London and Paris straddling the qualification line on 156 points each needing a tie-breaker to separate them.
The competition…
For most games, the e-sports world will be the pinnacle of game play – the very best players, the toughest matches and the biggest prizes.
The roster built for season 1 was impressive – Aaron Paul (of Breaking Bad) was a huge catch for them.
Alas the $100,000 Grand Prize (or $16,666 per player) was never going to cut it for such a long-winded series. It could never be purely about the money when this year has seen $1,000/$2,000 cash games, AU$250,000 tournament buy-ins and $10m prize pools all streamed on Twitch.
The much-hyped Cube failed to deliver over the summer – uninspiring, no six-max play (it was too small) and many of the heads-up matches were quiet affairs. Audiences continued to dwindle from the already precarious mid-hundreds from the end of the first phase.
Despite the press coverage encouraging the “reboot”, the second phase was more of the same – audiences continued to dwindle with some matches struggling to attract 100 concurrents and being beaten by the naughty Poker After Dark bootleg streams.
The Grand Final will involve 29 to 51 heads-up matches… the last seven months will reward the league leaders – Montreal Nationals and Moscow Wolverines – with a 30% chip boost for their first round.
The future?
Given how Twitch Poker has evolved over the past couple of years, there is clearly demand for something new. Until we are blessed with legalised online poker across the US (rather than three states), we’re not going to see a return to the televised poker days.
The GPL has the opportunity to develop something unique, but it needs to go back to the drawing board for Season 2. Could they consider a different poker variant, a charity angle, or more live events for example?
Das Duell um die Geld has been fairly successful lately. It’s no big hit show, but it does better than Joko & Klaas’s Late Night Circus Halligalli. Therefore Prosieben has shown the latest episode and will show the next episode on mondays at 22:15, the slot in which Circus Halligalli normally airs. Whenever this happens, Halligalli is pushed to 22:15 on tuesdays.
I wonder how expansive Joko & Klaas are for Prosieben. The shows all seem to be doing okay (except for Das Duell um die Welt which is still doing great in the targeted audience) but are pricey to make I assume. On the other hand they are almost the only faces Prosieben has and the young male good earning people watch them a lot, so the ad slots are easily sold I suppose.
The title of the show is ‘Das Duell *um* die Geld’ (rather than ‘am’, which wouldn’t even make any grammatical sense… not that the actual name does anyway, since it should properly be ‘das Geld’). It uses the incorrect gender as it is a reference to the existing show ‘Das Duell um *die Welt*’, not ‘De Weld’ as stated in the description from last month. Even if you were confusing it with Dutch, you would’ve put ‘om de wereld’.
I have no interest in poker, but I do take great interest in ensuring the accuracy of written German.
Edited, thanks.