ok, so I am a dork

But I find myself watching the final table of the 1995 WSOP on ESPN Classic. I like Dan Harrington; this is the one he won, and I like his style of play, and it was in reading his book that I really got going winning some money on Poker Stars.

But this stuff just isn't watchable. I mean, I guess it is, as I did watch it. But how? They had the father from 8 is Enough doing the play by play, and he doesn't know a thing about poker. I mean, clueless. Everytime he made a prediction about what the players had, he was off by a mile, and I am sitting there thinking, I wouldn't even consider those hands a possibility.

Here is my favorite example: the last two players are heads up, and the button raised to twice the blind and the big blind called. So far this is basically the way every hand starts heads up. It wouldn't be too different if we just changed the rules of heads up poker and went straight to the flop here. The flop comes KT6, and Harrington bets and the Howard calls. The next card is a 7, and there is another bet by Harrington, and the announcer is going on and on about one of them having an 8-9. I mean, if you called the post-flop pot-sized bet on little cards and a gutshot, well, you get what you deserve. The river is a 6, pairing the board. If I am playing this hand, and I am no expert, I am pretty happy to have any king. If I lose to a weird straight or him hitting trip sixes, well, that is just life. But the announcer goes on and on about well, he could have quad sixes and he could have a full house and he could have a straight. Theoretically, I guess, these are all possibilities. But it seems more likely that one of them had a king and the other didn't. (Harrington won the hand with a bet on the river. If I had to pick a hand for the other guy to be holding, I would put him on QJ, enough to raise with before the flop and enough to call a couple of bets to see if he could make the nut straight. I would guess Harrington had a K or a T.)

Of course, I could be the idiot here, and Harrington could have had quad sixes. (We can be pretty sure Howard didn't since he folded on the river and likely would have at least call with quads, a boat, a straight, or even a set.) Bottom line is that poker is simply unwatchable on television until the development that enabled viewers and commentators to see the hole cards. There are a couple of tournaments where Hellmuth did some color commentary, and those are actually pretty good. Because he wasn't emotionally involved, he wasn't a donkey, and his predictions of what the cards were turned out to be on the money basically everytime they would turn them over.

So now not only did I spend an hour watching an unwatchable poker program on television, I have now spent another fifteen minutes writing about it.

And on that note, I am quitting this and going to sleep.