Life and TV Times of a Poker Producer

It is widely believed that poker, both as a sport and as an industry, is currently somewhere between embryonic and infantile.



Clearly, it is short of maturing to that crescendo of a point where it will slip sharply, quickly, and shamelessly into the oblivion where the Rubik's Cube, Space Invaders machines, and skateboards now reside.



Regardless of its future or fate, poker, like any sport, will always have its founding fathers, and in Europe, many will appreciate the exploits of bookmaker Terry Rodgers, who brought the game of hold'em to Europe, 1999 World Series winner Noel Furlong, and European Poker Tour founder John Duthie, who also gained notoriety by landing the first £1 million tournament – the Poker Million on the Isle of Man in 2000 – and see them as forebearers of this growing craze.



That inaugural Poker Million, like all subsequent versions, was brought to you by Barry Hearn's Matchroom Sport, an organisation that successfully delivered snooker to millions of avid armchair viewers in the 1980s, but it's a game that many would claim is also about to take up residence in the history books.



Matchroom continues to televise and find airtime for poker – particularly the six-seat freezeout version filmed in studios within Leyton Orient football ground – along with other interests such as fishing, golf, and tenpin bowling – the latter of which are not filmed at Leyton Orient!



However, networks are screaming for more and more à la mode poker to wallpaper their satellite platforms, and to their rescue has arrived an unlikely saviour, 49-year-old Ian Langstaff.



It is not a name many would have heard of, but make no mistake, the father of three from Yorkshire has been a catalyst in poker's continuing growth for nearly five years now, yet his appetite remains insatiable.



Fittingly drinking a pint of beer in his adopted hometown of Dunlavin – a tiny spot that can be found on an Irish map in the middle of County Wickow, where the remainder of the population drinks Guinness, and lots of it – he explained: "I stood at this very bar one night and Late Night Poker came on the television. I watched about five minutes of it and declared to the barmaid, 'I'm going to put that on television. I'm going to commercialise it, and it's going to be big.'



"She told me I was mad, and she was not to be the last. My research led me to Irish Open Director Liam Flood, who seemed to be of the same opinion. I think our opening conversation went something like this: 'So, what do you know about poker?' to which I replied, 'Nothing; now, what do you know about television?'"



Within months of that autumn 2001 meeting, the world's first commercially sponsored poker tournament hit the screens.



Providing features for Channel 4 racing since 1992 – a job that led him to the fabled Punchestown Festival, where he met his wife, Sally (in 1995), who worked at the track – and having produced all of the horse racing for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, for three years, Langstaff had successfully befriended the majority of big wigs within the bookmaking industry, and it was the "brass" at PaddyPower, with no more than a sportsbook in their online portfolio at that time, who put their name to his groundbreaking concept.



Groundbreaking? Indeed. Late Night Poker had put under-table cameras on a single poker table, but the PaddyPower Poker Tournament was to be a conventional tournament featuring 27 players, all in camera view.



It was also to be the world's first sponsored event featuring an overhead flop shot, clearly showing the sponsor's logo. As Langstaff puts it, "The money shot in all poker events."



"That flop shot had to be cleared legally and involved a lot of meetings with a lot of regulators," he explained. "Nowadays, you could not imagine a televised table without it."



It was not the only hurdle that had to be overcome in his first venture into televised poker. A fruitless search of a studio meant the tournament was bizarrely filmed in a Catholic priest teaching college.



"Some of the resident priests were a little apprehensive, but finally we were given the go-ahead. However, we then realised we were without a green room for friends and family of the players, so, on the day, we had to use the chapel for that purpose. It led one priest to comment, 'It will not be the first time a game of poker has been played there, and probably not the last!'"



The net result was seven half-hour parts on SKY Sports – obviously, their first serialised poker event – and airtime on major stations around the world. To this day, it is regularly rerun on the smaller specialist satellite stations.



As 2002 got under way, the fuse attached to the detonating device that would explode Internet poker into the mainstream was only smouldering. Just consider, that year's World Series featured 631 players – headed by Robert Varkonyi, who probably now plays with his Rubik's Cube and on Space Invaders during his free time – without an online qualifier in sight.



However, despite clutching a contract to provide SKY with a weekly diary program from the world of Irish greyhound racing, Langstaff took on the World Heads-Up Championship from Vienna, producing it as a package and placing it, once more, on a sought after SKY Sports channel.



He repeated the trick in 2003, but got something of a rude awakening in the process. "I discovered for the first time that sponsors and promoters like to think they are also television producers. They are not, and at some point you have to reaffirm that too many cooks lead to cock-ups, and you cannot make a poker show by committee."



2004's World Poker Championships in Dublin's Merrion Casino, featuring the finest lineup ever assembled east of Atlantic City, was another problematical event covered by Langstaff.



"The venue was way too small to get cameras into, and the tournaments consisted of two tables of eight played down to a winner. We were due to stage two of those a day plus a grand final.



"The result of what could be called poor planning was disappointing shots, and a disgruntled crew demanding a lot of overtime, which meant our budget was stretched, and therefore post-production suffered.



"But, looking back on it, I don't think we ever had a budget to do a job properly in those early years, and more than once, we finished out-of-pocket. However, the products had to be delivered or we would lose face with broadcasters."



Dispensing with the greyhound show, Langstaff should have had more time to peruse sponsors and finally have a workable budget for an upmarket poker production he craved; after all, his CV was filling nicely and online sites were now cropping up like mobile phone masts, all looking for coverage to announce their arrival.



However, the tragic loss of a family member put day-to-day life on hold for almost a year as Langstaff upped sticks and moved his family to Spain to rebuild their lives, returning with "nothing more than a blank piece of paper and a host of ideas to put on it."



"I still had a lot of belief in poker and had returned to make a documentary for TV3 about the Irish Open, but like Bobsleigh, which I helped develop from a basic two-camera production in 1995 for Eurosport into a 20-camera transmission covering the World Bobsleigh Cup on a weekly basis, and on to involvement at the 1998 Nagano Olympics for CBS, I believed it should break away from what had somehow become the accepted 'norm' – namely, single-table shootouts and simplistic camera shots."



Upon his return, Langstaff decided it was time to dedicate all of his efforts to poker, setting up a purpose-built company – WinMedia International – alongside Production Manager Margaret O'Connor, and so far, the results have been impressive.



A team event was first on the agenda, with Star City Casino in Birmingham providing the setting for the Grand Slam, which was sponsored by an old ally, PaddyPower, which, in the interim, had launched an online poker room and taken the lion's share of the domestic Irish market.



"They [PaddyPower] were clearly encouraged by the response to the Grand Slam, as we were enlisted to produce the final of the Irish Open for them as a live event."



Once again, SKY Sports transmitted the action, and not for the first time, the broadcast colossus' BAFTA-winning director Martin Turner was loaned out to direct the shots.



In fact, Turner was in place for that very first Langstaff poker production, and is at the helm for most of the WinMedia/Sky Sports collaborations.



"Martin, who has been at SKY since it launched, brings a lot of integrity with him. He has his say on set design, lighting, and general look/feel of our poker productions, and as a director, I think he is the best in the business.



"While I'm sorting out studio sets, cameras, tables, lighting, sponsors, financing, editors, and a lot of other incidentals, it is good to know that the main man is at the wheel in the control room."



Remaining true to his pledge of "doing something different," the remainder of 2006 has been filled with the Ladbrokes Ladies European Championship – another conventional tournament consisting of 48 players with one feature table – and the International Poker Network's novel four-seat Fast and Furious Challenge, both filmed at Hammersmith's Riverside Studios.



Now added to the WinMedia roster for SKY poker broadcasts alongside Martin Turner and, when available, commentator Jesse May is Tournament Director Mags Manton, the former manager of the Merrion Card Room, who was in charge of the latter two events.



In the world of Langstaff, little is conventional. Not only had he never picked up a deck of cards when putting commercial poker on television, his own playing exploits still amount to no more than a weekly fun game at his local pub. Yet, moving away from single-table play and branching into other forms of game-show poker is his priority.



"I particularly liked the Fast and Furious Challenge, which was the first time rival online poker rooms put their players forward to compete against each other in a point-scoring team event.



"This could be done on a grand scale. After all, a lot of sites sponsor or claim to have world champion and WPT winners amongst their ranks. Let's sit them all in the same room, run the cameras, and see who really has the best group of players. After all, Formula 1 would be no fun at all if all the cars on the grid were from the same team."



Cash games and something other than hold'em, like Omaha, with a lot of in-depth, slowed-down post-production work, have also been muted, but much of WinMedia's focus is currently directed toward bigger audiences beyond the SKY domain.



"At any one time, I'd guess we are talking or working with at least four broadcasters and an equal number of potential sponsors, plus there is one event usually signed and waiting to be delivered. It means a lot of work, but the long-term objective is to go different, go bigger, go global, and go live."



Murdoch, Packer, and Langstaff? It doesn't quite rhyme, but from humble beginnings and with no knowledge of the subject matter, Ian Langstaff has clearly come a long way since filming a poker tournament in a priest's classroom.



As for the future, Langstaff is keeping his cards close to his chest, but the words World Poker League are touted frequently.



Watch this space or, more importantly, watch the screens.