It’s hard doing quiz poker

By | October 15, 2015

[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.

8 thoughts on “It’s hard doing quiz poker

  1. Brig Bother Post author

    Pokerface was actually a pretty good interpretation of what poker is, whilst not actually following any variant of actual poker at all.

    Reply
  2. Ronald

    Does “buzz if your partner knows the answer” type quiz gambling count in this category? I quite like that gimmick.

    I think the problem with rounds of betting is that you kind of already know how you are doing – Met het Mes op Tafel suffers for this, with a lot tactical all-ins.

    Reply
    1. Brig Bother Post author

      MHMOT is quite odd in that it isn’t (although it might have changed since I last watched) no limit, and it’s not played as a trad. knockout tourney, there’s more of an element of stack control and chip position, but yes the decision is really “in or out” because the betting’s pretty much going straight to the €50 max each time.

      Reply
  3. David

    I had a feeling that the DOND incident wouldn’t be a disaster- if it had been it would have likely leaked beforehand. (And a better ending than the accidental button press on the Dutch version- isn’t that one still in the courts?)

    Reply
  4. David

    There was a format called Last Man Standing (I have the video of it somewhere but can’t find it online, so this is from memory)

    They give a category, then show 20 possible answers- they’re not told how many are right (at least three are).

    The players have 20 or so seconds to punch in answers they think are correct on their private screen, then they have a betting round. They then reveal three answers that are correct, and if the players still in haven’t already chosen them they can add them to their list.

    Then another betting round, and then the players still in the game reveal how many answers they have picked (which theoretically could be more than the actual number of correct answers). There’s then another betting round. If there is more than one person still in the question at this point, they first go to the person who gave the highest number of answers.

    If they are all right, they win the pot. If they have a wrong answer, they go to the next person in terms of answer count. If multiple people gave the same number, they check all of them. (If all but one person folds, that person wins the pot, even if they had a wrong answer)

    If multiple people have the same number of confirmed right answers or everyone still in the question had a wrong answer, they go to a tiebreak question, which is related to the original category.

    Reply
  5. Daniel H

    Such a shame they felt the need to massively spoil DoND (and I’d only seen the comments not the video beforehand so didn’t realise they’d actually shown the confetti moment). What exactly did it achieve?

    This one has obviously been in the can for some time and they had managed to keep quiet about it till about two days beforehand – their spoiler posts will have translated to only a handful of extra viewers to the detriment of a much higher proportion of regular viewers.

    It’s easy to take for granted the sizes of the prizes on DoND now it’s been around so long but ultimately, talent shows aside, they’ve actively given away the biggest win on a UK Game Show, daytime or primetime, in over 18 months.

    Reply
  6. Paul B

    As I’ve mentioned before, Lights Out (which became Beat the Pack) was very loosely based on tournament poker (or at least observation of how different people behave when they have a chip lead).

    This post has actually given me a new quiz idea loosely based on poker principles, so watch this space (for several years).

    Reply

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