Two Months Two Million: Season 1 Recap
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The poker boom has produced a long list of television shows looking to ride the wave of the game’s popularity. This year witnessed a new entry to that list: Two Months, Two Million (2M2MM), which kicked off its inaugural ten episode run on cable channel G4 in August of 2009.
Before 2M2MM, the overwhelming majority of poker-related television focused on capturing the live poker experience and distilling it down to the most dramatic moments. 2M2MM (for better or for worse) represented a drastic departure from that model. The show followed four high stakes online pros – Jay ‘Krantz’ Rosencrantz, Emil ‘Whitelime’ Patel, Brian ‘flawless_victory’ Roberts, and Dani ‘ansky’ Stern – who all moved into a rented Vegas mansion and pursued the collective goal of winning $2 million dollars in two months.
A reality show with dashes of traditional poker programming (lots of cuts to online poker action mid-hand) and game show flourishes (the ‘loser’ in each episode was subject to a penalty stunt), Season 1 of 2M2MM was an interesting experiment on several levels, most notably in its attempt to craft strong personae for online poker players, a group that (from a mainstream media perspective) has been largely anonymous to this point.
Below we’ve recapped the season, with highlights, misses and profit totals. We’ve also included several comments on the shows straight from the source: Jay ‘Krantz’ Rosencrantz’s blog offered an interesting first-hand account of how one of the primary participants felt about the edited, packaged, produced and promoted version of a summer he experienced only weeks before most of the episodes aired.
Our general take on the show: Pretty entertaining stuff that definitely deserves a look from anyone interested in poker.
THE GOAL
Before we get into the episode blow-by-blow, here’s the stat most readers will be looking for:
Total profit / loss:
+$676,600
Total profit / loss per player:
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$406,500
Dani Stern: +$100,800
Brian Roberts: +$7,500
Emil Patel: +161,900
2m2mm EPISODE ONE
Overview: We meet the gang, get introduced to the mansion and get a broad overview of the goal. Some poker gets played, and the guys tool around Vegas a bit. Dani Stern comes up loser and has to eat at a Vegas buffet dressed in a pink tutu.
Highlights / Lowlights: The Tom “durrrr” Dwan and Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond cameos provided a little extra charge to the show, although most of their dialogue seemed pretty extraneous – hearing more about their thoughts on the challenge would have added to the episode. The show also spent a lot of what felt like dead time on extended dialogue exchanges between house members that were probably intended to establish character but instead just wasted opportunities to further develop the plot.
Krantz says…“My only complaints – would have liked to see us discuss our attack plan for the goal (I imagine that will come into play soon), and what we think of the goal individually.”
Results:
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$4,600
Brian Roberts: +$42,000
Emil Patel: +$8,600
Dani Stern: (-$19,500)
2m2mm EPISODE TWO
Overview: A pretty poker-light episode where the story is split between Emil’s search for a personal assistant and Dani’s struggles at the poker table. Stern comes up short again and has to (again) dress in drag and play a harp on the Strip until he makes $20 in tips for his penalty stunt.
Highlights / Lowlights: The search for Emil’s PA was a pretty useless storyline; it did introduce some fairly attractive women into the show but spent a lot of time establishing a character (Emil’s PA) who is basically a non-factor for the rest of the season. Bringing a harp player into the war room was just ridiculous, and not in a good way – it was one of those moments that really felt absolutely manufactured for the show. Again, scenes like these just took time from a show that desperately needed it to establish depth for its characters and the goal. The scene of drunken Dani is pretty entertaining, and his diatribe regarding poker is one of the most honest glimpses the show offered all season into what it means to be a professional poker player.
You also start to feel by this episode that the penalty stunts should have been chosen from a pre-determined list, as the ideas feel a little half-baked and don’t close the episodes very strongly.
Results:
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$147,000
Brian Roberts: +$46,000
Emil Patel: (-$11,500)
Dani Stern: (-$18,600)
Total for Week 2: +$162,900
Total to date: +$197,900
2m2mm EPISODE THREE
Overview: This episode takes the guys even further away from the tables and into a series of competitions with another house full of poker players. Episode 3 introduced Aaron “aejones” Jones, Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger, Daniel “Starkey” Starkey, and Steve “Zugwat” Silverman and pitted the two houses against one another in a handful of scenarios. Stern comes up loser for a third straight week, but his house wins, leaving aejones and crew to clean the 2M2MM house. Krantz takes the biggest losss but doesn’t do a penalty stunt, a deviation from the norm the episode doesn’t ever really explain.
Highlights / Lowlights: The lack of a penalty stunt isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it does undermine the show’s consistency a bit. The house wars concept isn’t a bad one, but it’s just too many characters crammed into one show with basically no backstory (and therefore no real reason for a casual viewer to care). It’s one thing to shoehorn in Tom Dwan for a minute or two – he’s been on HSP and PAD – but trying to convince casual viewers to watch and care about aejones vs ansky is a tall order. The episode does do a good job of developing some of the emerging tensions in the house and at capturing the swings that are inherent in the world of online poker.
Krantz says…“I thought this was by far the weakest episode. Too silly and far too pointless to come at this time in the series’ lifecycle. House Wars in and of itself is a pretty good idea – introduce some rivals, some new interesting characters, peel back the world and show that we’re not the only house of online poker players living in Vegas for the summer – but making it the primary focus of the episode undermines the more important storyline, the pursuit of the goal. This wouldn’t have been a problem if we had more time in the first two episodes to explore the quest, our motivations and our attack plan… but instead, I felt that structuring the episode like this didn’t give people enough to root for, and there just wasn’t enough at stake.”
Results:
Jay Rosenkrantz: (-$80,000)
Brian Roberts: (-$4,000)
Emil Patel: +$32,800)
Dani Stern: (-$33,000)
Total for Week 3: -$84,200
Total to date: +$114,400
2m2mm EPISODE FOUR
Overview: This episode focuses on Krantz’s quest to get a match versus David Benyamine and Dani’s corresponding match with Benyamine’s then-girlfriend Erica Schoenberg. Krantz is again the biggest loser for the week after his brief match with Benyamine goes south, and this week he does the penalty stunt, which consists of Jay getting on stage with members of an all-male revue and doing a couple of strip numbers.
Highlights / Lowlights: Nothing wrong with screen time for Schoenberg, although the match itself between her and Stern was pretty useless. The buildup to the match between Benyamine and Krantz offered an interesting insight into a part of the high stakes poker grind that you don’t hear about very often – the acquisition of action.
At this point in the season, it’s becoming apparent that trying to cram what amounts to a unique A and B story (Benyamine / Schoenberg) into a 22 minute episode along with some advancement of the larger goal storyline and the house dynamic storyline is probably a mistake that’s hurting the greater narrative arc of the show. That said, the show is starting to cash in on some of the personae developed in earlier episodes – especially Roberts, who is starting to emerge as a character many viewers are likely to feel pretty ambivalent towards – exactly the type of Puck-esque character that reality shows need to fuel viewer interest.
The penalty stunt was also a winner, thanks to a more developed idea that provided quality fodder for Krantz and allowed the show to stage a minor buildup to the stunt for the first time, generating a greater payoff.
Krantz says…“Benyamine promised to play me in 4, four hour matches across multiple tables. I got one hour on one table the entire summer. Even if we don’t get a Season 2, you haven’t seen the last of our rivalry. And if we do get a Season 2, you will see me have my revenge.”
Results:
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$1,000
Brian Roberts: +$9,500
Emil Patel: +$27,200
Dani Stern: +11,000
Total for Week 3: +$48,700
Total to date: +$163,000
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