It's time to speak up, because poker is flagging a little and television has as much responsibility as anyone else in keeping the fire burning. In 1998 I created an experimental TV show called
Late Night Poker, a show with the kind of budget that forces you to either burst your brain trying to work it out, or throw in the towel before starting. It's now 10 years on and, though there have been some big developments, in so many productions, we're still simply forced to watch a parade of lazy poker television clichés. Each poor production is guilty of draining the poker community, drip by drip, until very soon the audience will realise that they just don't care anymore. And for that very reason alone, it's time that televised poker grew up.
There are common misconceptions about how televised poker works, and for many years now I've watched in pain as most poker programming flagrantly misses the mark. The much lauded under-the-table cameras are seen as the breakthrough that allows this deceptively complicated game to be revealed, but any producer or director who believes that just doesn't get how it all works in the first place.
I have heard many times, "Bring back
Late Night Poker," or, "I still look back at those shows as being the ones," and whilst I don't doubt that this has more to do with nostalgia than anything else, I like to daydream that within those sentiments lies an appreciation of the care that was taken in trying to audaciously pull off this drama, and maybe just a little pining that in general, televised poker just doesn't operate in this way anymore.
Late Night Poker was one of those ideas that seep out of you when you put the right ingredients into your brain and just let them stew. The ingredients on this occasion were
Who Wants to be a Millionaire (which had just started on British TV to
huge success), "a non-question quiz show," "a show where the participants had to invest something of themselves," "a show rewarding skill," and for my own personal interests, "a quiz show that wasn't a quiz show that crossed genres with this new reality-drama thing" (in the late '90s, everyone was busy trying to define "reality"; a whole bunch of TV people were getting very excited, and I guess I was one of them).
Very late one night, about two weeks into the stewing process, while playing a card game with a friend, a flippant idea about poker was born. At the time it felt like it was nothing more than a by-product, a curious lump of green formed whilst waiting for gold. But the next morning when I was writing it up, the purity of what really wasn't much of an idea at all ("Let's show poker on TV," and have it late at night … I know, we'll call it Late Night Poker! And we cracked up) became its greatest strength.
Late Night Poker - it was never called anything else - was born. The next day a one-page treatment was faxed and met with curiosity and genuine enthusiasm. The idea was written and rewritten before submission - the vision was to show real people playing real poker with their own real money, but it seemed necessary to soften the blow for a bunch of TV execs who would undoubtedly have better things to spend their money on, so there were ideas in there about celebrities playing, or that perhaps it would be more of a "chat show with poker." Thank heavens for Steven Keane, the head of the newly formed "4Later" and an all-round experimental television guru. The proposal couldn't have hit a more perfect set of eyes at a more perfect time. "Nah," he said when we had our first meeting, "I want the real stuff." I could have kissed him. Keane commissioned the show there and then. "I want about eight parts plus a pilot, and it all has to be dirt-cheap … bye."
After the euphoria of that moment, it was time to work out just how the show was going to be put together. I was given the job of producer, which was unexpected. If I'd known then what I knew come the end of my time with
Late Night Poker, I would have spent many hours defining that role before accepting it, but at the time, well, you'd have had to drag me down from the ceiling before trying to talk any sense into me.
I was becoming a regular at the Stakis Casino in Cardiff and played £10 rebuy tournaments there a few nights per week. I found myself daydreaming the dramatic reveal of hands as I was playing them in the tournament: "I raise and now we see his cards, and, oh my god, it's a trap, but can I work it out?!" On one occasion I took it too far and said my commentary out loud; needless to say, the guy wasn't too eager to reveal his cards upon my request, and I was looked at a little oddly afterward.
The format for the series was clearly going to be some kind of tournament, but it seemed important at the time that we had to have a winner for every show (something we regretfully didn't really achieve in series one), leading up to some kind of end-of-season overall winner (something we achieved spectacularly when the Devil Fish took the trophy; he was the perfect
winner for series one; I love the Devil Fish). But the most essential thing was letting the audience in on the drama. We had to open the game up, find a way of recording all of the different elements so that we could express what was by nature hidden and secret. We needed to see those darn cards. We needed to show the drama, because if we could crack that, then we could film any old format and it really wouldn't matter (something that I think has been proven over the years - right, Mr. Lazy producer?).
Well, the cards are facedown on the table, and without touching them, how do we show what they are? An interesting side note to this is that when I first suggested that the cameras were to be put underneath the table, I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no budget for this and the idea was dropped for a couple of months while an alternative solution was sought. "We sneak around the table and ask the players what they have, very quietly?" "The players hold the cards above their heads so we can record them whilst asking the other players to look away?"
Suddenly, the budget was found. We had the designer mock up one spot with the glass around and the camera underneath. I can't tell you how excited I was when we saw the image off that shot on the monitor; there was the show right there; that's going to be our great dramatic reveal; and
Late Night Poker was finally born.
Wrong. These thoughts were both naïve and premature. So much emphasis has now been placed on formats and on camera angles that the real reason poker should work on TV has been swept under the carpet and forgotten. The truth is that the key to poker's success has nothing to do with one gimmicky invention at all.
So, what was invented? Or rather, what invention was really needed? Simply, a group of people who would learn and discover a new talent set that would allow the intricacies, subtleties, and intense dramatic curves of poker to shine from the screen and grip a nation of viewers who didn't even suspect that poker was missing from their lives. This was the time for the poker auteur to be invented, a person who would appreciate the individual elements of this drama, from understanding that each hand is its own scene, and that these scenes, when handled correctly, make up "acts" with their own stories, flavours, and subplots, and that numerous acts combine to make the overall drama, the beginning to end of the game. I'm not kidding, poker justifies this attention to detail, as all the elements are there. And it has nothing to do with budget and everything to do with a lot of hard work.
And so if I'm proud of one thing, if I feel like I really achieved or invented something, away from the gimmicks, it was the care taken to try to make this drama as suspenseful and as entertaining as possible, given the very limited resources available. Selecting roughly only 20 hands from a possible 80 or so that our full games took in order to tell this often intricate story about ups and downs and ins and outs and ebbs and flows can drive you to distraction, and then to turn each hand into its own minidrama of revelation and tension. Holding back and pouring forth complicates the whole process further, but when it works, it is fantastic. And the under-the-table cameras? They are just part of the tools at your disposal, to use when you need to and not a moment before.
This brings us to the
World Series of Poker. If it wasn't for the
World Cup, I wouldn't care so much about football. I live my life in four-year cycles based around this great sporting event, and I can honestly say that I have the same feelings about the
World Series of Poker, as well. Take this event away, water it down, ruin it, and I stop caring so much about poker.
It's Phil Hellmuth I feel sorry for. At the exact moment that he was winning his 11th bracelet and his PR team was moving into overdrive, everyone else realised that the overload of events had rendered every minor bracelet worthless but for its meltdown weight alone. Poker needs its world championship, and every year for the last few years, we have moaned and complained a bit about what is going on and what should be done and how it should change. But this year more than ever before, with a deathly silence, a needle dropped and those of us who care heard it clear as a bell. We have to hope that when the counting is done, there is still a story left to tell, because this year a lot of people stopped caring, and that frightened me.
The
World Series of Poker is not just poker's greatest event, it is also one of America's great stories.
ESPN does an admirable job in covering it, but it is time to push on. It's a story of thousands of players, not just a handful, and it's live for days and weeks. And I want to know what's going on because I can't get enough. In the hands of a good storyteller, one who understands the makeup of good television poker, one who isn't misled by gimmicks and formats, this story will be told every year, and when the final table is set, it might just end up being an event that rivals the
World Cup final.
There are many in the industry with enthusiasm for the future of poker, particularly the live televised kind, who could be the future of the
WSOP. But when it comes to fixing the problems surrounding the final-table coverage, I fear that people are asking the wrong questions - because the problems involve understanding all the elements that are needed to make it work. And I'll tell you right now that the solution could have everything to do with deleting the very element that allegedly made televised poker work in the first place. Ditch the holecard cameras, and you could be 77 percent of the way there. There now, doesn't that feel better?
Editor's note: Rob Gardner died on Aug. 6, 2007, at the age of 36. He is survived by Heather and their children Isaac and Erin. This letter was his last written work.
