Here’s some Monday night fun, do you remember Israeli format The Money Pump? It’s a bit like Million Pound Drop if the contestants couldn’t talk to each other. We discussed it here.

Anyway it looks the show’s creator put up an English language pilot recorded for CBS, look:

ITV Studios had the rights to it at one point.

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?

Yesterday evening I did my second ever Escape Room (two for two, thanks for asking). It was, as usual, tremendous fun. And also as usual you can’t really talk about it with people who haven’t done it.

If you didn’t watch Race to Escape first time round, now you can with Spanish foreign subtitles. Pity it didn’t get a second series. We originally discussed this last July.

Edit: Ooh! Thanks to Alex McMillan for finding this, it looks like Geek and Sundry (the Youtube Channel that gave the world Tabletop with Wil Wheaton) have their very own escape game show coming!

Not specificially gameshow related but likely to be of interest to readers, there’s an Android board game Humble Bundle currently going where you can spend about fiver and get a metric ton of board game conversions (we’re all about Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride and Galaxy Trucker). It’s a pity it’s limited to Android, if I’m going to virtual board game I prefer the screen estate of my iPad, but if you’ve got an Android tablet (and hey! I’m sure they’ll be fine on a phone) there’s hours of fun to be had here without needing to get your bits out (*). And some of the money goes to charity.

Edit: It looks like you’ll need to load them onto your phones manually rather than through some sort of Google key, which seems a bit unfortunate.

Edit Edit: There’s an app but it’s a little bit of a faff.

(*) Wooden and plastic tokens.

I missed the first ten minutes of Only Connect last night, coming in just as round one was finishing up. Therefore I missed Victoria’s pre-show message about there being a mistake in the show with relation to the Gang of Four, only wondering what was going on when she popped up again during the credits.

Amusing that it went through several people and nobody spotted it at the time, intrigued to know who picked it up and when. Still, holding their hands up rather than attempting to style it out (which won’t fly with this particular audience) is admirable. Will the losing team get another go? Given the scores at the end and the location of the clue it probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome.