I don’t normally discuss poker on this website for a couple of simple reasons:

• I haven’t watched much or played much lately.
• Every time I mention the five letter word, I get spammed in the comments section like you wouldn’t believe.

It’s the new year now, though, so I’m going to give it a shot.

NBC’s Poker After Dark began overnight on Monday night/Tuesday morning. It’s a nightly show at 2:00 a.m. Each week is a new tournament, six-player, winner take all. $20,000 buy-in. This week’s group includes Annie Duke (darker-eyed than ever), Phil Hellmuth (as entertainingly arrogant as ever), Gus Hansen (who I always love to watch play), Huck Seed, The Sheik (pompous jerk), and Steve Z. (can’t remember how to spell his last name.) Future players are a Who’s Who of poker-dom. Trust me, all the big names are scheduled for this series. Five shows make up a tournament, and then the sixth is supposed to be an interview with the winner talking about the week’s game.

It’s hosted by Shana Hiatt, last seen a couple of seasons ago on the World Poker Tour. She’s married now and the lawyers have sorted through her WPT contract and found the out they needed so that she might host the show. But she needn’t do much, and that’s the strength and the weakness of the show.

The idea of this series is that you’ll see most of the hands and get very little commentary. There’s a disembodied voice that once in a while will spell out what a player needs to win on the river, or to make a little quip leading into commercial. But there are no commentator personality types. Hiatt is there to intro and outro the show and provide spotty interviews, it would seem, but that’s it.

Thankfully, there’s a ton of table talk to keep you entertained. With the rivalry between Duke and Hellmuth, that much was certain. But the abrasiveness of The Sheik helps, also. And Steve Z is just a dirty old man. Gus and Huck keep mostly to themselves, but insert themselves here and there. The poker almost becomes an after-thought, as you get caught up in the soap operatives of Duke’s attempt to find out how long Hellmuth has been married, or Steve Z’s bet on the longevity of Duke’s marriage, or Gus’ inexplicably tight gameplay. They discuss politics (Gus would be an Obama man, for example, if he had a vote), the business of poker, and competing tournaments. (Annie loves the BlackJack series on CBS. Gus doesn’t.)

For a change, you’re not seeing a tightly-edited and well-scripted attempt at increasing the drama of the show. You’re seeing most of the hands, even the ones where the table folds around to the big blind, or where the pots are tiny. Everyone starts off with $20,000 in chips. By the end of the first hour of play, the spread isn’t all that great. I think the difference between first and last is from $23,000 to $17,000. It’s glacial, by comparison to say, Poker Superstars Invitational, which moves so fast because it’s so quick and short-handed and high-blinded.

It’s very interesting to watch “real poker,” and not the edited stuff. It’s fun to see the strong personalities of poker unleashed. It’s great to see TV that feels more real.

But, there are times when it seems like nothing happens between commercial breaks. The play gets repetitious, if not monotonous. And the banter at the table is very distracting from the game, itself. You’re not always able to split your focus between the two, especially when the volume drops lower on the table talk and you find yourself straining to hear every dig.

It really de-glamorizes the game, which is likely a good thing in the long run. I just don’t know if it makes for strong enough television for an average viewer to enjoy. On the other hand, the average viewer isn’t tuning in at 2:00 a.m. to watch this thing — only the poker fans are TiVoing it.

To sum it all up, POKER AFTER DARK is trying a different angle at a game which has been wildly overexposed in the past couple of years. They have a very strong lineup of competitors and a format which helps to expose them. It risks, though, being the pokerless poker tournament. And the lack of focus during the tournament could lose viewers’ interest. I’ve only watched the first hour of the series so far. I want to try it out for the full week before deciding if it’s a gift for late night junkies, or just a snoozer.

You’ve been warned, either way.

(And as a sure sign of the times: If you missed an episode, don’t worry — they’re available on the NBC website to watch.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.