Lekker! This week Bother’s Bar goes Dutch where Monday to Friday we hope to showcase some interesting (and long running) Dutch quizzes and games that you can watch online. Dutch catch-up services for their main channels seem rarely geoblocked. For the latest Dutch format news we recommend visiting Squared Eyes’ It’s All About Television blog.
Today Met het Mes op Tafel (With a Knife on The Table), probably the most successful and longest-running poker-based quiz in the world. It is hosted by the actor Joost Prinson, who also invented it with John Cook. It has been going on and off since 1997, currently two series a year are broadcast on NED2.
Three people are staked €750 in actual real looking money. Each round begins with an ante (beginning at €10, doubling through each round until being capped at €80). Four questions are asked and contestants write their answer on a telestrator. The first player (rotating after each round) must either bet (between €10 and €50) or fold. Subsequent players my fold, call (match) the bet, or raise it up to the €50 limit. Joost then reads out the answers, then another round of betting. If more than one person remains, the first player to act must reveal how many answers they’ve got, then there is a further round of betting. Finally, if there is more than one person still in, the pot goes to the person with the most answers – if there’s a tie, a showdown sudden death buzzer question is played.
The lowest scorer is eliminated after round four leaving with nothing. The game continues heads-up until round seven which is all or nothing – the person behind has to go all in and the leader must match it. Another round of four questions, but after they’ve been asked the leader can choose to have one question replaced by another in the same category. The person with the most money at the end is the winner and gets to take it home. Each series is a tournament with 9 heats, three semi-finals and a final, with a large bonus for the ultimate champion.
(Questions to Dutch friends – if the person going into the final in the lead loses, do they keep the money they would have had in front of them? And conversely if the losing player had so little that the final pot still wouldn’t put them in front, do they do anything to juice it up?)
There’s not much on Youtube, here’s a clip from 1997. It plays basically the same but the cash and betting limits are slightly different because it’s played with guilders.
The first thing to strike you is how low-key the whole thing feels – the opening sequence does not shout “game show” at you. It properly feels like a backroom of a public house, albeit one with its own bar and piano player (Martin van Dijk, with barmaid Mylou Frencken providing vocals). Joost Prinson seems rather eccentric. As a sort of world it’s quite enticing and wouldn’t feel out of place as a show that would fit right in late night ITV circa mid-nineties, except they’re still making it for Friday evenings in 2013.
The game is interesting. As a no limit poker player myself I thought the betting structure seemed a little odd, but it is simple to grasp and it means the show doesn’t finish within two questions. When I first heard about the show ages ago I remember there was a suggestion that instead of a buzzer showdown there should be an estimated guess question. I was completely down with that right up until actually watching it for myself, whilst I think you’d get more poker out of it it’d also add a lot of extraneous work – if you asked them to do it as part of the set of four, they’d only be resolved once or twice per show. If you do it at the end then you’d be adding two rounds of betting to a round. I’m not quite convinced, although I’m sure there might be a better solution than the buzzers.
Anyway as promised you can watch episodes in full right here. The official webpage is here.
