WSOP on TV

[Don]

So was watching the whatever hundredth rerun on WSOP main event on TV today and it got me thinking. Obviously the announcer guys cannot possibly be doing this anytime close to when the actual event occurred, yet the show shows these announcers also present at the day of the event (at least looks that way). Given that the 'live' version is delayed 15 minutes and nobody gets to see the cards that are discarded, one would assume those shortened version are done at least a day if not several days after the event is over, so do these guys just show up at the day of the event to take a picture of themselves and then go home? Because they obviously can't do anything useful while the event is actually going on. After all, with so much money at stake, it sure wouldn't surprise me if someone just bribe these guys to know what cards the opponent discarded/folded/etc. This can be valuable information and when you're dealing with millions of dollars, it's not unreasonable to expect to get whatever edge you can. I mean if someone paid me $100k or whatever I can certainly tell him soandso seems to do this and that while having a big hand. It may or may not be right but assuming I can see that guy's hand, it's clearly some info only I know that no one else does so people certainly might want to pay me money for the info.

I also noted that these guys always track any rising guy pretty well since WSOP is almost always won by a nobody, so it might be even a week or more before these guys actually do their show since if you do it live, there's virtually no chance you'll follow the right guy correctly and you don't want to look like a fool spending half of the program highlighting someone who bust out first hand the next day.

So it wouldn't surprise me if these shows are done while the announcers already know exactly how the hand plays out. Now, that itself isn't a problem, but if you've something that basically looks like pro wrestling, why not get the pros to do it? The wrestling announcers all sound like they're actually into this kind of stuff, and compared to that the two guys WSOP has doing are basically total amateurs in terms of pretending that they don't actually already know the outcome. They're just not very good actors. I assume they get those guys because of Poker knowledge or whatever, but you don't need Poker knowledge when you already know the outcome of the hand and what card all the participants have. Any of us can sound like a super pro with that kind of information, so just hire someone who is actually good at acting and forget the poker Pro part.

[KluYa]

Knowledge of the game of poker is pretty important to be a commentator. So are various personality traits etc. I do think most of the commentators right now are pretty bad though.

Not sure what year you were watching but last year's espn coverage was pretty blah to casual viewers. They've axed most of the live coverage this year for that reason and only the main event final table will be (near) live this time around. The One Drop (which is new this year) was live too and I thought it was a pretty decent watch.

[Don]

You obviously need poker knowledge if you're doing it live. I watched the live stuff and the guy sure sounds like they know what they're doing. That's fine.

But the dramatized version where every other hand is like an AA versus KK or whatever, that you don't need any knowledge about. The guy commenting it sees the cards of both players and probably already knows about the outcome. I can sound like a super genius in the same situation. It's literally impossible to be wrong when you know the outcome + the cards both players have assuming you've even a minimal amount of knowledge.

The bulk of the WSOP stuff is not live so it should be pretty easy to hire some guy that knows how to act and put on a good show. Again, all the WWE commentors sure sound like they're surprised by what's going on even though surely they are already told of the script and what to say ahead of time.

[KluYa]

It's really not that simple. Merely knowing who ends up folding or who drags the pot is not going to convince anyone who who actually understands poker that a commentator is a super genius. A large part of their job is to offer insight into why exactly world class players are making the decisions they make and provide a small window into their thought process. You see this less with ESPN as they tend to stay with more of a play by play approach but even then, it's difficult not to eventually sound quite stupid if you only possess rudimentary knowledge of the game. What you speak of has been tried - several times. You have people like Norm Macdonald (lol) hosting HSP alongside Kara Scott and commentating on the play. It's positively brutal. He's not quite as horrific as when he first started the job but he's still pretty bad. The man he replaced, Gabe Kaplan, is probably one of the best commentators there ever was (and has 7 figures in tournament winnings) but even he embarrassed himself during Tom Dwan's original appearances (Dwan at the time being arguably the world's most brilliant player). He admits in more than one instance to have no idea what Dwan is doing. You can try to have these people read from scripts, word for word, but so far it hasn't worked, and that's not the direction I'd like to see poker commentating go anyway. Most of it is recorded live, as it should be.

[Don]

In the Main Event 90% of the guys are amateurs anyway so even if you're a super seasoned pro you'd never be able to figure out what they're doing because it's not really supposed to make sense. You're only going to sound like a fool if you're trying to predict someone who doesn't play by any established rules.

Assuming the goal isn't to sound like a fool then the whole thing obviously have to be scripted because nobody on the entire planet can possibly predict what's going to happen in the Main Event. I mean no I don't really think making Poker like WWE is the way to go, but currently it's more like the announcer is almost always wrong if they actually tried to predict what's going on. This whole thing is obviously done for entertainment since you don't see too many boring hands to begin with, so it's already kind of fake anyway.

There's no way something like the Main Event is recorded live since it spans multiple days. You'd have way too much of an edge if the guy doing the recording lets you in on some inside tips. Even in the one day tournaments these obviously can take many hours and have breaks in between. Unless the recorders are physically locked in a room with no form of electronic communication whatsoever, it'd be rather simple to call one up during your lunch/dinner/bathroom break and get all the information you need. Sure, it might not actually tell you anything if you learned the other guy folded pocket Aces on that huge hand earlier, but I'm sure some people is willing to cheat to get that kind of info.

Listening to the announcers is even worse than listening to the sports guys. At least in pro sports you can be pretty sure that no pro team is suddenly going to do something crazy like playing with 5 Centers or empty net on the first period. In WSOP stuff equivalent stuff like that happens all the time, and it's futile to try to predict that kind of stuff. Now if the announcers really just do a play-by-play that might be okay, but clearly the show wants to do more than that. It's one thing to hear a basketball guy say, "They got to play better defense to win" but at least it's very hard to say that's wrong. In Poker if you attempt to make any definitive statement about what's going on you'd almost be proven wrong immediately if you didn't cheat. When they're doing WSOP live whatever pro they get who are trying to second guess what's going on is almost invariably wrong because if they're as awesome as they claim, they'd still be in the tournament! I remember several hand where the pro literally just starts naming every reasonable hand up to like 20 of them and I think he did get it right, but if you let me name 20 starting hands chances are pretty good I'll get one of them right too.

[KluYa]

The idea is not to try and make predictions about what amateur players will end up doing. About as close as you'll get to that is to comment on what these players ~should~ be doing (which would require a solid understanding of the game) and if their actions don't conform to what rational judgement dictates, it doesn't in any way make the commentator out to be a fool. Beyond this, good poker players generally crush bad poker players in spite of the argument that it can be difficult to narrow their range as a hand progresses. If you can exploit them at the table you can certainly criticize them from the commentator booth. You needn't soul read someone for their precise holding to own them on the felt as long as you're consistently making bets which yield a positive expectation, and you needn't such clairvoyance as a commentator either as the emphasis really isn't on guessing what they have or what they'll do. The audience will typically know all the hole cards anyway, and sometimes the result of the hand as well.

Anyway, I'm just saying the actor thing has been done. Norm is an actor (a poor one, granted) but there's just so much more that goes into being a strong commentator - for any sport.

The WSOPME final table is broadcast just about live and that's unlikely to ever change... at least anytime soon. A lot more of the ME used to be live. Part of the decision to change that for 2012 was amateur players speaking out and complaining that it wasn't fair to them. Everyone could see how they were playing hands. The pros don't mind this as they have a lot of their hands recorded anyway either online or on television. Their overall games are, in this particular regard, not the enigmas the relatively unknown entrants are, and of course the pros are for the most part better at using such information to exploit the amateurs than vice versa. I'm not personally concerned with whether the coverage is live or not, as long as the commentating is of some quality. As an aside, they didn't start coverage until day 3 in 2011 which was a pretty large mistake IMO, and the underwhelming ratings last season helped contribute to the format changes we're seeing now. Perhaps they'll get it right eventually.

[Don]

Um, anybody can talk about what you should be doing when you can see both player's cards plus the % chance of winning for each player. I mean I can see this guy has a A7 that pairs his Ace and has 89% chance to win and say 'he needs to be more aggressive because he has top pair' but that's because I can also see the other guy clearly does not have anything. You can literally just say 'the guy with a higher % chance of winning should be aggressive" and that cannot possibly be wrong because as the commentor you can see who is winning, while neither of the player can know for sure unless they've a no brainer hand.

If they want to do something that'd convince me of their knowledge they can say pick randomly one guy's hand they can see but not the other and then see how accurate it is, and don't pick guys hands like pocket Aces because anybody can tell you how to play that hand. I mean for drama reason something like pocket Aces versus pocket Kings seems to happen every other hand, and you seriously believe me you're supposed to assume the enemy has pocket Aces when you have pocket Kings?

[KluYa]

Um, anybody can talk about what you should be doing when you can see both player's cards plus the % chance of winning for each player. I mean I can see this guy has a A7 that pairs his Ace and has 89% chance to win and say 'he needs to be more aggressive because he has top pair' but that's because I can also see the other guy clearly does not have anything. You can literally just say 'the guy with a higher % chance of winning should be aggressive" and that cannot possibly be wrong because as the commentor you can see who is winning, while neither of the player can know for sure unless they've a no brainer hand.

Um, all of this here is extremely inaccurate. Knowing 2 players' holdings will not make somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about suddenly understand the game, and will not qualify them to comment on how either player should be playing. To that point, saying that someone needs to be more aggressive because he has top pair and his opponent has nothing makes no sense. Villain is playing correctly by folding him off the worst hand. Why not try to induce a bluff? Why not weigh the probability that they improve to a lesser hand (on a later street) you can extract value from versus the probability they outdraw you entirely? This is just talking about their actual cards which don't mean a thing unless the hand goes to showdown.

There's just so many other things to consider that a terrible poker commentator staring at a couple of card images on a display wouldn't even fathom. Furthermore, they'd simply be looking at each hand in a vacuum by doing this which even in a MTT is an error. Yet another point (and one of the most significant) is that poker players base decisions on their opponent's range as well as their own perceived range, not exact hands the actor/commentator would be going by (since obv you can't see their exact cards when you're at the table), and this alone would promote some rather silly comments.

I'll try to come up with an example, as you did. We'll suppose that a tight player currently in the blinds 3bets AA KK QQ AK and throws in 92o to balance and help him get paid off a bit more with his value hands. It's folded around to the you on the button and you open raise 2½ blinds with your KQo. The nitty player with the aforementioned range jams for 23ish BB effective and puts you to a decision. Everyone watching the broadcast can see this player has 92o. The commentator can see he has 92o. The hand on its own does ~not~ suggest you should be calling in this spot, and the commentator would be wrong to try and justify you calling off your chips if stacks are anywhere near similar in size. Villain only holds 92o a little over 26% of the time here even though he happens to hold it in this particular instance. The nit's mistake is that his shoving range contains too few bluff combos and so you can snap muck in this spot and move on. By factoring in his entire range it's a clear fold as your hand is only 36% to suck out versus his range of hands and there's not enough dead money in the pot to justify an almost 2:1 chance of either crippling or eliminating yourself. A commentator should at least know not to praise a call on your part, which would be terrible, when he shoves with 92. In practice you're never really going to know their exact range the way I precisely defined it in my example but you'll know whether a player has been playing loose, playing tight, what he's been opening roughly (in terms of a percentage), how thinnly he's capable of value betting, how many times he's 3bet or checkraised or taken whatever line on whatever board over X number of hands and so on which will all aid in constructing a range of hands in various preflop and postflop situations.

So no, I assure you that knowing what someone got dealt will not turn an actor or anybody else into an expert on poker theory... or even make them interesting to listen to for that matter.

For the most part, people who are into poker and are experienced at it aren't interested in simply hearing obvious crap being spouted by people (actors, or whoever) who are basing their "knowledge" and "insight" solely on what everyone viewing the program can see for themselves; the hole cards displayed on the screen. We know what these players have. We're already quite aware of anything that somebody ignorant to the game of poker could possibly try to deduce strictly via the hole card camera, and we'd be well aware when he screws up and says something ridiculous. This isn't captivating nor informative nor entertaining.

Oh, and nope, not anybody is going to be able to tell you how to play pocket aces btw. When blinds are small relative to stack sizes (like in the beginning stages of a multi day tournament), it would be incorrect to get stacks in with KK since QQ or worse is not stacking off that deep if the opponent is halfway competent. With that in mind, 5bet shoving AA pre against this player does nothing except chop with the other 2 aces given that KK isn't getting it in. I don't doubt there are commentators who don't actually grasp that, let alone "anybody" else. It means that your 4bet calling range should theoretically be 100% of the hands you don't muck after your squeeze or whatever play you're making. To some it may seem counter intuitive not to make another raise holding AA after someone else in the pot has shown a lot of strength by reraising your bet, but playing like that just isn't going to work unless you attempt to 5bet bluff a number of times prior and then pick up AA right when somebody finally decides to take a stand.

I used a preflop example with AA since it would almost be too easy to make my point if we were talking about AA post. Very few people would be qualified to tell me how to play my hand if I opened from early position with AA, got called in 2 or 3 spots, and had to play a multi way pot out of position with my tournament life in the main event at stake.

I'm probably going on about this a bit too much. It's just that my jaw almost hit the floor reading what I did.

[Don]

You're not impressing anybody by making up a bunch of jargon. I know guys who play professionally and made a lot of money on Poker (at least before the whole online crash wiped out all your earnings) and they say exactly the same thing and sometimes they win big and sometimes they lose big, and none of these guys got anywhere in the ME. Especially with the ME is considered, you are playing against guys who most likely have no history of any kind. The variance from dealing with thousands of people wipes out pretty much all your theory stuff which is why very few pros ever make it to the Final Table in the TV era of poker. If you actually tried to say all that on a show without already knowing the outcome you'd right about 50% of the time which is the same as anyone randomly guessing the outcome. During the live version of ME they had all kinds of pro talking about what's going on in the hand and their track record is no better than just randomly guessing, because if they're anywhere near reliable they wouldn't all be out of the tournament to give you their opinion. There is no insight to be gained from the Main Event because if someone really has that kind of insight, he'd still be in the event instead of explaining this stuff to you.

I get that over the long run statistics wins out but ME is pretty much the one event where statistics and theory is not meaningful. On ESPN they had this guy from FBI that explains how certain tells gives away what card people had and you can tell it's 100% fake because if that guy is really that good someone would've hired him as a sidekick for the real thing (I think you're even allowed to look at your fans and stuff, and it'd be trivial to work out a code ahead of time with your expert if you're not sure about something and assuming he can actually figure this kind of stuff out), and pretty much every kind of analysis fall under the same boat for the simple reason that if it worked, someone would've tried it already in the ME.

If you want to say that theory stuff applies to any event besides the ME, sure I can buy that except ME is what they show on TV about 99% of the time so clearly the network doesn't think anyone's actually interested in watching any other tournament so it's irrelevent.

[KluYa]

I'm not making up anything lmao, and I'd be surprised if my post you're dismissing was really that difficult to comprehend considering I tried to keep things pretty straightforward and clear. I'll make another effort to convey my point.

You said "Um, anybody can talk about what you should be doing when you can see both player's cards plus the % chance of winning for each player".

I said this is way off base.

The reason it's so terribly wrong is that the players at the table aren't looking at their opponents' cards through a camera and obviously need to use other lines of logic as well as tells etc to narrow their opponents' range and make decisions that way. If a commentator tried to explain why a player took the action he did, he can't just say it's because the other player has J7 or 92 or whatever two cards ofc. If player A put villain on a specific range of hands or even a specific solitary hand, joe schmoe commentator is not going to have a clue as to why because the monitor isn't going to tell him.

I honestly don't think my point is here is particularly complicated to grasp.

I'm glad you know people that have made some money playing cards. If any of them want to play a few k hands heads up with some escrow on the side, they are certainly welcome to get in touch.

The FBI person you're talking about is Joe Navarro. He and probably Caro are actually pretty good when it comes to physical tells but this in itself is a small aspect of playing solid poker so the value in hiring someone for this reason is pretty small.... not to mention collusion during the WSOP is prohibited.

Knocking a pro for not actually being in the tournament is odd after you've already conceded that the event is almost always won by an amateur. You can obviously play perfectly and still bust to a bad beat or whatever.

[Oracle]

I prefer 52-pickup myself. Do they televise that yet?

[kali o.]

What a random and odd argument. Anyway, I miss seeing the WSOP on TV.

I'd offer to take you on Kluya, but I discovered while I am a great tourney player, I am a piss poor 1v1.

[KluYa]

I got into HU play a number of years back in an effort to improve my overall game in other NLHE formats. It actually helped a great deal given that most postflop pots (beyond the micro limits, anyway) are played heads up, and I'd recommend this to anyone else looking for ways to work on their game. These days the bulk of my volume is on 6max tables though.

[SineSwiper]

Back when we used to get that Game Show Network channel, I really liked watching High Stakes Poker. It was cool watching the cash games, and the announcers weren't morons. A. J. Benza and Gabe Kaplan could really talk about the interactions and read between the lines over each play.

Not to say Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten are morons either, but I hate their announcing skills. They treat every card like it's a super event. Phil Gordon (from Celebrity Poker Showdown) was an excellent announcer, but the celebrities were usually idiots that didn't know how to play them game. Phil Hellmuth, as much as a prima donna he is, actually makes a pretty good announcer.

The Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament was one of my favorites, though, because both the players were excellent as well as the announcers.

What a random and odd argument. Anyway, I miss seeing the WSOP on TV.

I'd offer to take you on Kluya, but I discovered while I am a great tourney player, I am a piss poor 1v1.

Back when I was playing regularly, I found that my big weakness was in the middle. I could play against 10 people and play pretty well 1v1, but the numbers/odds get kind of weird in that 4-5 player range. Yeah, you need to play more aggressive, but how much more?

[KluYa]

Gabe and AJ were always my favourite pair as well. Not that there's a lot of quality commentating to pick from, but I found them to be pretty consistently entertaining without taking away from the hands themselves. Wasn't too thrilled when AJ left.

Regarding sitngo play, I mean there's no simple answer for that because it (greatly) depends on blind levels relative to effective stacks as well as opponents and positions etc etc, but as far as cash play goes I have sorta a general rule of thumb I tell to people who have trouble adjusting as players stand/sit and tables wind down or w/e. Take the number of players sitting with you and the reciprocal of that is more or less the percentage of hands you'd open with. At a 6 handed table for example it'd be reasonable to open around 20% (1/5th) of hands. If it's 3 handed then 67% isn't out of place and 5 handed would be around 25% (it would be much wider on the button ofc and tighter UTG, but it averages out). Something like this could certainly apply to sitngo play if the blinds aren't too large yet. As they increase, a simple ICM calculator would prove to be the best tool you could use instead.