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Two Months Two Million: Season 1 Recap

2m2mm EPISODE FIVE

Overview:The house suffers a major setback as all four members (essentially) turn in losing weeks. The normally steady Roberts gets rocked for a six-figure loss and the pressure of the goal finally takes center stage as Krantz decides to bail on the house for a trip back east to get his head straight.

Highlights / Lowlights: This episode provides a couple of couple of hits, capturing the oddness that can occur when poker professionals interact with people who are completely unfamiliar with the world of poker professionals chief among them. Example one: Krantz interacting with his mom. Example two: Emil and Dani interacting with their dates (I guess credit card roulette must seem pretty odd to most folks). That’s the sort of examination of the intersection of the worlds of poker and not-poker that makes for interesting viewing and gives casual viewers something to relate to.

Robert’s penalty stunt – having to do stand up down at the Four Queens – isn’t bad, but feels far too similar to Krantz’s the week before, offering additional support to the idea that penalty stunts shouldn’t be spontaneously devised by the house.

Krantz says…“105 finally brought everything together. It did a terrific job addressing the pressure of the $2mm goal, how frustrating it was to just get crushed every time we managed to find a good nosebleed game during the first half of the summer, how difficult it is to keep your head on straight when you just can’t put together consistent wins. Brian said it best – no matter who you are or the stakes you play, there’s no way a loss doesn’t affect you in some way.”

Results:
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$1,000
Brian Roberts: (-$111,000)
Emil Patel: (-$16,000)
Dani Stern: (-2,000)

Total for Week 5: (-$128,000)
Total to date: + $35,100

2m2mm EPISODE SIX

Overview: Another episode dominated largely by the introduction of more online poker players to the mix. This week it’s a group of younger players who have come to the 2M2MM house for coaching: Harry “UgotaBanana” Kaczka, Dave “NLsoldier” Schnettler, Wladimir “insyder19” Taschner, and Ben “pokiethepanda” Middleton. When they’re not being coached, the group is partying with Krantz and co on the Strip. With the coaching fees added to their total, the house manages a respectable win.

Krantz and his boot camp teammate Middleton get the penalty stunt for the week, and end up dressing up as conjoined twins and doing the hula-hoop on the Las Vegas Strip for tips.

Highlights / Lowlights: There’s really not much difference between this episode and episode 3, and this episode suffers as a result. Cramming more unfamiliar characters into the mix doesn’t do much to advance the primary characters, and the B story of heading out to the strip feels pretty recycled at this point in the season. Same for the penalty stunt, which is basically a redux of Stern’s epsiode 2 stunt. While the younger crew doesn’t service the series so much, they do offer a fascinating peek for outsiders into a world where kids not so far out of high school are faced with decisions daily dealing with numbers that rival yearly salaries of many viewers.

The goal is starting to seem less and less achievable at this point, a fact that the episode barely acknowledges. It seems like the goal – which gives the show its name – should be a far more prominent character in this show, but we’re barely seeing its influence outside of the tally segment at the show’s end.

Krantz says…“Secondly, the show has been poker-lite in several episodes (wouldn’t be a big deal if we were crushing the goal but we’d been losing or breaking even those weeks) suggesting that all we do is party and vacation. Now this is true to an extent but 2M2MM is actually really accurate in capturing what it’s like to be a high stakes online poker pro in Vegas over the summer. Very, very little is staged to be “reality tv-esque,” which is something that I’m proud of and something that speaks to the reason we have a TV show in the first place.”

Results:
Dani Stern +$26,500
Brian Roberts: +$32,500
Emil Patel: +$17,900
Jay Rosenkrantz: +$29,100

Total for Week 6: $106,000
Total to date: + $141,100

2m2mm EPISODE SEVEN

Overview: The house organizes a Connect 4 tournament for charity and ends up raising about 20k for the Lili Claire Foundation, which helps those suffering from “Williams Syndrome and similar disabilities.” Each house member is tasked with coordinating a different aspect of the fundraiser: Emil gets the menu, Roberts handles the entertainment and Stern (along with Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger) is supposed to get girls to show up. The show also adds a reward element to counteract the penalty stunt, with the biggest winner getting a 5k watch. Roberts wins the week and the watch, while Krantz comes out loser and is forced to roller skate in mildly embarrassing clothing down parts of the strip. It’s also the first episode that gives significant air time to Deuces Cracked.

Highlights / Lowlights: The interaction between Roberts and the rappers he hires to create a song for the fundraiser is pretty awesome TV. It’s also entertaining to watch Stern and Lichtenberger experience massive failure in their attempt to convince women to come to the fundraiser, even though they’re backed by cameras and a good cause. The subplot with Stern and the one girl they do get to show up is pretty awkward, and the tournament itself is pretty boring and gets far too much episode time.

Best part of the episode: watching Roberts mercilessly smack talk the other house members about how he’s going to win the watch, including lengthy and vocal musings about exactly what type of watch he’d like – and then watching Roberts deliver.

Results:
Dani Stern +$11,000
Brian Roberts: +$46,000
Emil Patel: (-$19,000)
Jay Rosenkrantz: (-$44,000)

Total for Week 7: (-$5,500)
Total to date: + $135,600

2m2mm EPISODE EIGHT

Overview: Krantz finally has the sort of monster session viewers were probably expecting from a group of high stakes online players when he busts up David “Viffer” Peat for over 350k in a session filled with serious ups and downs. That session is part of a larger ‘lockdown’ devised by Roberts in an attempt to focus the group on their increasingly unachievable goal. The rules of the lockdown: for 36 hours, the group will stay in the war room, with only one member allowed to leave at a time. The results are largely positive for the group, although their win for the week is almost completely attributable to Krantz, who played much of his Viffer session after the official lockdown ended. Stern continued his losing ways and ended up stuck with the penalty stunt again, resulting in a swim by Stern in the fairly filthy pool of the aejones house.

Highlights / Lowlights: The Krantz vs Viffer session is undoubtedly the strongest poker segment of the season to date, although Viffer’s bet-sizing tell seems a little too convenient and absolute to not be at least partially a fabrication of the editing process. Whatever Krantz picked up, it worked, as attested to by the insane graph of his earn during the session, posted below:

The penalty stunt was, again, fairly useless. Returning to the aejones house doesn’t do anything for the show, and it speaks to a larger issue the show seems to have: remembering that it’s a show about four particular online poker players, and not a general survey of the online poker community.

Krantz says…“Funny aside – when I got back to up $100,000 on him [Viffer], the producers started begging me to quit. They were so shook up that they could barely hold the cameras straight. The money was just so huge and incomprehensible, I had just completed this legendary comeback, and they couldn’t bear to deal with the thought of me losing more again

The next day, the network executive in charge of the show showed up to the house to see how Lockdown had gone, saw the big black number in my column on the tally board, and G4’s collective brain exploded. Two years in development, seven episodes’ worth of footage and storylines, and they still didn’t fully understand the kinds of swings and drama that were possible in poker until that moment.”

Results:
Dani Stern (-$22,600)
Brian Roberts: +$9,000
Emil Patel: +$34,000
Jay Rosenkrantz: $351,000

Total for Week 8: +$371,000
Total to date: $507,000

2m2mm EPISODE NINE

Overview: With the summer coming to an end, the guys start to look offline for opportunities to pad their bankrolls. Their solution: a high stakes home game. The majority of the episode focuses on their attempts to get the game together and the actual execution of the game.

Players at what has to be one of the tougher home games ever assembled included: David Williams, David “Viffer” Peat, Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger and Andrew “good2cu” Robl.

Highlights / Lowlights: The episode just doesn’t make a lot of sense to anyone who plays poker seriously. If you’re in Vegas around the time of the WSOP, is hosting a game at your house with a ton of solid players (and David Williams as ‘the fish’) really the best plan? It also doesn’t make for much better TV than just watching snippets of online pots.

It also felt like more attention could have been paid to Viffer, especially given the massive session he and Krantz had played just an episode before. Instead, Williams gets the majority of attention (and he probably isn’t too happy about how the show portrays him).

Krantz says… “Firstly, I want to publicly apologize to David Williams for last night’s episode and its depiction of him. In its pursuit of a storyline that would make for a compelling part of the show, 2M2MM dramatized what would have been (in non-TV land) an otherwise boringnothinghappened live game by using good editing and interview bites to make David out to be a fish. David, I don’t really know you but I am sorry it came off like that, especially considering all the players who played in that home game were basically going out of their way to help the show (not many people are going to play in a tough 100/200 cash game on TV just for the sake of playing in a tough cash game on TV). Calling someone “dead money” is relative – David is clearly better than 99% of poker players on the planet and just because my prick egotistical wonderboy NL cash specialist self forgot about the cameras and got caught up in TVland does not make the depiction fair to David or entirely accurate. Also, fwiw, the hand David got stacked on was pretty damn standard – he opened 26hh in LP, flop 9h7h6x, David bet/3-bet Chewy all-in and Chewy held, they only ran it once. So yah, David, I will take all the blame here, I am really sorry again – I owe you a bottle of very expensive alcohol the next time I’m in Vegas.”

Results:
Dani Stern +$47,000
Brian Roberts: +$12,000
Emil Patel: +$53,100
Jay Rosenkrantz: (-$3,200)

Total for Week 9: $108,900
Total to date: $615,900

2m2mm EPISODE TEN

Overview:With the goal pretty firmly out of reach, the final episode focuses primarily on the party the guys are throwing to mark the end of the summer. Some poker still gets played, with Roberts and Ansky essentially switching places on the won/loss ladder after Roberts drops 75k and Stern picks up a bit over 100k. Krantz doesn’t play and Emil grinds out another solid five-figure win.

The penalty stunt is absent from the last episode.

Highlights / Lowlights: Some of the party planning provided quality comic fodder, especially scenes with Jay and Brian auditioning an inflatable balloon artist and those covering Chef’s former career as a singer. Roberts really comes off poorly in the episode, both for his abrasive and critical personality and in the coverage of the online losses to Larsluzak that likely gave his tone a bit more bite than it might have had otherwise.

Robert’s decision to play Luzak can be seen as an admirable attempt to get some high stakes action going in the waning days of the challenge, an arrogant mistake made in service of Robert’s goal to come out on top of the house leaderboard, a reasonably neutral EV decision to provide some show fodder, or a mix of all of the above.

Dani’s purchasing of 2k shows contrasted with his professed admiration for a girl that can “snap him back to real life” only a few minutes later in the episode provided another great insight into the mindset of a younger kid still coming to terms with what he does for a living.

Results: (week / season)
Dani Stern – +$101,000 / +$100,800
Brian Roberts -$75,000 / +$7,500
Jay Rosenkrantz $0 / +$406,500
Email Patel +$34,800 / +$161,900

Total for Week 10: $60,800
Total to date: $676,600

If there’s a vote for a Season Two, we’d definitely throw our support behind the ‘bring it back’ camp with a couple of caveats. First, the penalty stunts need to be reworked. They didn’t do much to encourage additional drama or competition given their relatively low stakes. Second, the show needs a stronger controlling arc. The goal is neat, but it proved difficult to work into the show as a force for driving the narrative. Maybe a few subsidiary goals or a season-long competition between the goals would provide the support that the show’s season story badly needed. Finally, let the show be about the guys first, and the online poker community / Vegas a distant second.

Regardless of how you felt about the show, hats off to Krantz and co for putting themselves out there and by and large doing a solid for the image of online poker and online poker players.

Read Jay’s blog here.

Most of the 2M2MM high stakes online action takes place on Full Tilt Poker. Catch the guys in action – sign up for Full Tilt here.

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