{"id":9578,"date":"2016-11-20T11:23:25","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T11:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=9578"},"modified":"2016-11-21T07:59:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T07:59:03","slug":"sportifying-poker-the-final","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bothersbar.co.uk\/?p=9578","title":{"rendered":"Sportifying Poker: The Final"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in April the Global Poker League<\/strong> started<\/a>. 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\u00a0was meant to culminate at Wembley this Tuesday by playing a game set inside a large perspex cube.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that doesn’t look nearly as exciting as the one promised at the start of the season<\/a>\u00a0(in fact it looks like they’ve dropped the live game aspect totally in favour of heads-up “battleships” style poker).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>. The question is “what is the total sum of all of Adele’s albums?”<\/p>\n