The new year saw the first of the £1,000
Grosvenor UK Poker Tour events sell out quickly in Bolton, the crowds attracted by the added money, play-favouring structure, and the fact that the tour is being televised on
Channel 4. Even dinosaur televisions with no added extras will be receiving poker when the new one-hour shows start to air in the second half of 2007. Each three- or four-day event gets two shows, enabling the final table to be covered in a more thorough way than viewers may be used to - up to 30 hands, making the program more than the exits-over-substance type of coverage like that of the early
World Poker Tour, although stopping short of the no-gaps live filming pioneered at the
Paddy Power Irish Open last March.
The inaugural event gathered a bunch of the top UK players, along with those who'd been organised enough to secure a seat earlier in one of the online or land-based qualifiers. The winner was London-based
World Series of Poker bracelet-winner Praz Bansi, who took the healthy top prize of £75,000 (£10,000 of which was added; no deals for that part of first place were allowed). The structure provided a competitive final, and although Praz ended up heads up with his "Hit Squad" teammate Karl Mahrenholz, there was no question that the trophy and £3,000 entry to the
Grand Final event at the Victoria Casino at the end of the year were hotly contested. Third place fell to Ian Nelson, while New Zealander Greg Howard came in fourth, the only gap in an otherwise UK final table - the other members of which were Damon D'Cruz, Alan Henson, Ray Wyre, Simon Nowab, and Joe Grech (in descending order of place finished).
It is possible that the profile of this tour will encourage entrants from further afield; it would be interesting to see how the British circuit players would react to a hundred aggressive Scandinavians descending on Plymouth, for example. But even if it remains comparatively local, the combination of main events into one cohesive package has spread this country's high buy-in events evenly throughout the year, and full fields look to be the standard.
At the other end of the spectrum (online as opposed to live, a new venture as opposed to an established series), an innovation long on the cards is being introduced by an already well-known name: Sky. The media empire's latest channel promises more than the eerie specters of animated greyhounds and lone roulette presenters talking through the small hours of the morning: It's a dedicated channel with an ambitious new program aiming to get people playing poker via TV - the medium that may well have introduced them to the game.
I was treated to a sneak preview tour of Sky Poker's Feltham studios, in which the marvels of empty green room plus much high-tech gadgetry equal nightly shows of commentary on online poker multitable tournaments. A series of guests (who play along with the onliners) and presenters, such as Helen Chamberlain and Sean Boyce, discuss the action with the third category, experts (they've got Ed Giddens, Tony Kendall, and Trevor Harris lined up, among others).
This has, of course, been done before (albeit with a smaller budget, and without CGI that the makers of
Shrek would pause to look at). The interesting part is the new interactive format that is available to potential players at home, with the hardware in many cases already in place (clever, isn't it?). I first heard about Internet poker through interactive TV about a year ago at an industry conference. Inasmuch as one can already wager money with a remote control, it seems a logical step for a company big enough to cope with the startup and advertising costs of a new poker product in a near-saturated market to make that leap to combine TV and Internet multitable tournament players at once. People with a Sky Bet account will now be able to use it to play poker via their set-top boxes, simultaneously watching the whole thing live (with a five-minute delay, of course) on the new channel, or streaming on the Web.
Pressing the red button on TV remotes seems a nonthreatening way of signing up to play low-stakes poker for the first time. I was assured that age checks and parental controls are used to stop the underage curious from getting on, while the legality of the service is kept simple, in that it will be available only in the UK at first. It remains to be seen whether numbers of new players, transferred from the other Sky Betting arenas or intrigued by the new show, will actually make money for the venture. High rakers are unlikely to be delighted with the Web version being a Flash applet instead of downloadable software, and novelty alone isn't enough to tempt these fickle, bonus-sensitive players to a new site, especially a UK-only one where play is for sterling and the potential field is limited.
At the time of this writing, the software was in final beta-testing stages. I was told it was proprietary, and (my tiebreaker) did not have an advance "Check/Call Any" button on the no-limit hold'em cash tables, the latter reassurance getting a big thumbs up, as often, no-limit hold'em poker software is mutated from its limit variety without consultation with actual players. Expecting no huge innovations from this aspect of the launch, it's the two-sided interactivity that makes it intriguing. Having the play of one's avatar discussed by Messrs. Kendall, Giddens, et al. is a pretty distant experience from being filmed at the final table in one of the GUKPT events, but it's a place to start for new players, or a diversionary one for old.
Jen Mason is part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.
