[Shout out to Deal or No Deal‘s Box 23 being interesting for the very second time in two years today, I don’t know the outcome at time of writing but the advert makes it sound VERY DRAMATIC.]
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?
The one poker quiz that’s had some success is Met het Mes op Tafel which pretty much breaks the rules – it’s not based on hold ’em (it’s probably closer to five card draw, as an equivalent) the betting is quick (its rules are unusual but they work for television) and there’s lots of questions in its half hour slot. It’s open to question how well it works as poker after the first few hands (when the antes get quite large if you stay in after the first round of betting you’re probably staying to the end no matter what) but it does work quite well as television. And that’s the important thing.
Saturday, 7:15pm UK / 8:15pm Europe