Antepost

Invite Only on the Box

About two years ago a number of poker players, myself included, were summoned to a television production company to audition for a part in a primetime game-show called Vault. It was presented by Chris Tarrant.

Bizarrely a pretty young woman with flowing locks and sizeable mammary glands was given the role as the mathematical expert ahead of us poker players who, for the most part, have a face like a squeezed tea-bag, and are as sombre as a pallbearer yet possess an ego you can see on Google Earth. I really could not understand it.

But, sincerely, I was shocked and horrified to discover that contestants for this and all such game shows are auditioned. To me TV game shows are competitions open to the general public, all and sundry in essence.

Wrong. You have got to have a nice smile, affable nature, funny mannerisms or something unique that gets you through a screening process and on to our television sets.

But, when I come to think of it, the vast majority of televised poker tournaments in this modern day era are no different. Sponsors provide the players — from their pool of sponsored pros with the odd online qualifier thrown in the mix — the tournament directors, the commentators and, of course cough-up the sponsorship money to fund both production and broadcast costs.

No matter how you look at it televised poker is becoming one big television commercial — on occasion it’s surprising it passes the regulators. It is also a barometer to just how lucrative the online poker business is. But so were the products associated with a host of game shows in the U.S. during the 1950’s most notably Twenty-One which, famously, ended up before the House Committee on Legislative Oversight.

Would it not be ironic if, amongst a setting of so much petitioning for online poker playing restrictions to be lifted in America (See Jen Mason’s column in this issue), the vast money-making machines which are commercial online poker sites are summoned to Washington DC to explain their monopolising televisual marketing campaigns before they make their case for regulation and legislation?