OK Gang, here’s some fun for you, you may remember Alex Davis of Buzzerblog fame does a sideline in podcast gameshows with Bob Hagh under 5Hole Productions, his first one last year was Double Cross (sponsored by QuizQuizQuiz). I didn’t think it was by any means perfect, but I thought it was a good try and that it was nice to see someone have a serious go at it.
Anyway, things seem to be working out for them and tonight sees the first recording of the new season and it’s promising a lot of change. The first new episode goes out March 14th. So why bring it up today? Because they’re going to do a live video stream of tonight’s recording and you can watch it by clicking here. It starts at about 1800 ET, which my knowledge of poker software suggests about 2300 UK time and should last about two hours. The first season is downloadable on iTunes from here.
Speaking of poker, don’t forget it’s the fifth game of the BSOP on Sunday, do join in.
Okay then. Thoughts in no particular order:
I think the betting makes a bit more sense than the points lambada from last season. However, it seems like points rarely changed hands. I can’t remember what the scores were after round one and before the final bet, but I feel like the scores barely got any distance between them. Part of that might have been the contestants knowing a lot of the questions, but maybe increasing the stakes a bit (min. bets of 30 and 60?) might get more chip-passing. (And just now I checked the tweets, and it seems Brig just suggested the ante idea, which might work better.)
LOVED the twist for the bonus round, although I guess the surprise is gone from now on. I could only imagine the reactions if the winner had found out right before starting that the loser that he just spent a good bit of time complementing was about to screw him over. Hopefully tomorrow’s contestants weren’t listening/watching so you can milk more of a reaction out of them, because it’s really a devious and fun twist.
Small aesthetic thing I just noticed tonight: You ask your contestants if they’re ready for their question before every question. And in retrospect, I think even Bob does/did it on PinPoint a good lot as well. I don’t know if it’s some sort of legal thing that you have to confirm with each contestant that you’re about to ask them each question, but it gets grating after a bit. I’d like to think that especially here where there’s always only two players, it should be implied that the question always alternates from person to person, and that a quick acknowledgement of who’s next is all that’s really needed. Saying “here’s your next question” is fine, but saying “here’s your next question, are you ready” and then waiting for a response adds an awkward stop to the action, small as it might be. I’d be willing to bet that if you eliminated this, you could actually trim down the show by about a minute. Which might be good or bad, I don’t know, but it’s just something that caught my ear and once I heard it, I kept noticing it.
I also realized that I’m a total freaking dork when I mentioned Pasapalabra in the chat. I apologize for that.
That’s all I’ve got for now, although I’m sure some other thought will come up eventually.
I ask if they are ready because I want to make sure they are hearing the audio and everything is working. They are edited out in post.
Yes I basically agree with this, I noticed the first X questions not much was really happening with the scores (a sneak preview of how the game works: A question is asked, player A gives an answer and a bet, player B has the option to call the bet if he believes player A is wrong or bluffing, in which case player A wins the pot if player A is right or player B wins the pot if player A is wrong, or fold, in which case player A just wins their bet back if they are correct but wins double their stake if they were bluffing/wrong) and I figured that the idea of antes a) keeps the poker theme and b) allows for a bit of score movement on otherwise dead questions.
It remains the sort of format where ideally the difficulty of questions needs to be slightly more difficult than the players’ comfort level to get the best out of it and I think if yesterday was anything to go by then it’s getting there, I didn’t think there were many I would have been able to give correct answers to immediately.
I look forward to hearing it in podcast form. I don’t think the format is amazingly outstanding but I think it’s handled with enough verve to carry it off.
I’m looking forward to War of thr Words, which they’re describing as The Cube with word games and competitiveness.
I also think with some tweaking you could get a pretty good TV version of this, although I think you’d have to limit the multiple choices to the person answering the question to encourage bluffing (I actually don’t think this is a bad idea generally but it’d be a pain to organise in audio form – give a big massive bonus if they secretly go “off the board” and get it past everyone – anyone can be wrong and get lucky like in poker after all, deliberately going for it and it working out looks brilliant) and add one or two players.
I think when people try and adapt poker to television, they think too much of the structure of hold ’em and not enough of plain vieing. I think something like this has a better chance of working.
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