Posted by Junelli 9:43 AM
Last night I watched the WPT III Championship at the Bellagio (not sure if it was a repeat). In my opinion, the show was nearly as unwatchable as Celebrity Poker Tour.

In 2 hours it seemed like they only showed about 25 hands (an average of 7 min per hand). They spent twice as much time on the drama of the flop and commentary from Vince and Mike. Also, almost every hand televised was a very weak preflop all-in. Very little poker skills are displayed by going all-in with K8 and getting called by A4. In the entire show I did not see one hand that impressed me as requiring anything more than elementary poker abilities.

And for each all-in (which was just about every hand), they would spend 10 minutes showing the players getting up from their seats and walking around near the audience while Mike chirped, "He's up a creek without a paddle." They would delay the flop to build suspense and then wait a good 2 minutes before dealing the turn and another 2 minutes before dealing the river.

To quote the movie Billy Madison, "We are all now dumber after watching you."

That's just my opinion. Does anyone else think that the quality of the show has deterioriated in pursuit of drama and higher ratings?

1 Comment(s):

Posted by  Dr Fro, at 12:09 AM, August 26, 2005  

I agree.

It's like they did a bunch of marketing research to find out why people watched it so much the first season. They learned that people liked the drama, the sunglasses, the freaks and all the hoopla other than the actual poker strategy.

The problem is that the ordinary Joe that was drawn in by those things has been playing a lot of poker for 2-3 years now and he no longer gets off on such shallow coverage. He has been reading the books written by the poker stars and he wants to see something more in-depth.

It reminds me of the Simpsons, whose original draw was from high school age kids that enjoyed a fairly silly and simple cartoon. But those fans got older, went to college and generally developed a more sophisticated view. They craved a more nuanced humor and the Simpsons delivered.

I wish WPT would, too.

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