February 4, 2004
Poker

Over.  The Super Bowl, the game to end all games, at least till next year, is behind us.  New England’s squeaker          Sunday was a ratings and financial windfall for CBS.  But what about the poor schnooks at the no Super Bowl networks?  What did they program Sunday afternoon?  Giving up and running a test pattern (remember test patterns?) until after the game wasn’t an option.

    So how did the NBC attempt to woo viewers away from the Super Bowl?   The Paris Hilton “exercise” video?  Nope.   “The Best of Greta Van Sustern?  Wrong again.  Against the mighty Super Bowl NBC featured “The Travel Channel World Poker Tour Battle of Television”. 

     Poker, in television terms, is on a roll.  You felt guilty catching yourself stopping mid Sunday morning channel surf to gape at three or four good ol’ boys trying to catch bass?  That embarrassment is miniscule compared to the wave of guilt that will rack your body after you catch yourself staring at the tube while five or six sunglasses wearing uglies (they don’t want their opponents to read their eyes we’re told is the reason for the shades but it’s also true televised poker is not a contest that tends to attract really handsome people) play “Texas Hold Em” for millions of bucks.

     A rainy afternoon in Hawaii found me condo bound with no diversion other than the telly.  On the tube, being programmed simultaneously on four different cable channels was poker.  When did a poker game become a television staple?  On Fox Sports Net, Bravo, ESPN2 and The Travel Channel was everything from “Celebrity Poker”  (calling the contestants celebrities required a leap of faith equating the term with anyone ever appearing outside the center square on “Hollywood Squares” or finishing as first runner-up on a reality show) to “Guys You Never Heard of Playing Poker”.

     I am a card illiterate who struggles to comprehend “Hearts” (“Grandpa, hearts haven’t been broken yet”) or “Hand and Foot” (“Whose turn is it?  Oh mine”).  When you have the attention span of a gnat it’s even difficult to keep the rules straight to “Go Fish”.  So I asked my friend Big Poolie to explain Texas Hold Em in terms I understand.  Poolie not so patiently explained in Texas Hold ‘Em two cards are dealt face down to each player.   Then four cards, also dealt face down, are aligned in the middle of the table.  This center table array is called “the flop”.  All players share the “flop”.  The betting starts after the first two cards are dealt.   The players can only guess what their opponents are hiding but the TV magic “lipstick camera” allows viewers a peek in every hand.  After the opening bet, and as each of the four cards in the flop are turned over, there is another round of wagers.  Once the flop cards are face up each player is dealt a final card face down and then the betting really gets hot and heavy.

    From my biased eye it appears the tournament starts out with a couple of hundred entrants and after 6 or 7 years they get it down to two people.  At some point one guy goes, “all in”, bets everything, loses and is wiped out.  Immediately all spectators congratulate the loser, as they’re sick and tired of spending hours watching two guys play poker.  The winner receives a check for a couple of million dollars and all players then move to another cable channel where they start over.  Of course there’s a slight possibility I miss the essence of the game.

     The one area where televised poker suffers no fall-off in quality from other TV sports is color commentary.  The poker announcer sagely saying, “I really like that raise” is an absolute intellectual when compared with the drivel, “That New England defense really came to play,” passing for Super Bowl analysis.

      TV poker, it appears, will be with us until it heads down the same path to television oblivion walked by Bette Midler and any supporting actor from “Seinfeld” when given his own show.  But never underestimate the average Americans preference to gaze hypnotically at folks doing anything, no matter how mundane, for big bucks.   Are  “Celebrity Scrabble” and  “Million Dollar Old Maid” just over the TV horizon?