WSOP on ESPN: What Got Lost in the Shuffle?

Chris Grove : November 13th, 2009

This was my first year watching the final table of the World Series of Poker live. I’ve been to several WSOPs in various capacities, but I’ve never had an occasion to catch a single hand of the final table. This year I caught a good bit more than a single hand – in fact, I watched about 20 hours of play – and I was surprised to find myself still very interested in watching the WSOP on television less than a day later.

Everyone knows that the ESPN version of the WSOP and the actual thing are obviously miles apart. That’s no slight on ESPN – even the most dedicated fan would balk at watching every hand of every event. While I’ve always understood that the two were apples and oranges in many senses, it wasn’t until this year that I had a chance to directly observe the ways in which the transition from the stage to the screen (so to speak) altered the story of one of the most publicized tournaments in poker history.

It’s important to have some context to appreciate just how distilled the final ESPN product is. The ESPN broadcast of the final table spanned a bit over two hours (including commercials, interviews and various bumpers). Final table play took about 17 hours to get down to heads up, and then heads up play took about two and a half hours for a grand total of about 20 hours. ESPN showed 30-35 hands, while live play took place over the course of 360+ hands. So what got left on the cutting room floor?

In my mind, the biggest casualty of the editor’s knife was clearly Antoine Saout. Maybe it’s because he’s French and his English is a little halting. Maybe it’s because he came in very short and very unknown and wasn’t given much of a chance to make a deep run. Whatever the reason, viewers at home were really robbed by the exclusion of Saout’s excellent storyline. He, along with Eric Buchman, absolutely dominated the early stages of play, and most players who listened to the entire broadcast or watched the final table live would probably agree that Saout was the best player at the table. More impressively: he handled his short stack and his big stack with equal skill. If Cada hadn’t hit a two-outer to survive his three handed all in versus Saout, you’d probably be reading stories of Saout’s incredible final table performance. Instead, some of the best play the final table of the WSOP has seen in recent years will remain only in the memory of a few.

Eric Buchman suffered a similar fate. Buchman played textbook big-stack poker for several hours and bent basically the entire table (save Saout) to his will. Viewers don’t ever get a sense of how dominant Buchman was – the highlight they see is Buchman sucking out to eliminate Schaffel. Buchman’s exclusion is less a result of him as a character ala Saout (he got plenty of interview time during the ESPN show) and more a result of ESPN’s approach to present the broadcast as a pseudo-live event. ESPN never acknowledges that hands occur in between the hands it shows, and as a result you never see (or hear about) the multiple pots Buchman took down preflop without a fight. They don’t make for good TV in and of themselves, but they do make for a better show by putting the bigger showdowns in proper perspective. It’s always surprised me that ESPN didn’t take an approach along the lines of what PokerStars.tv does with their Sunday Million highlight shows – create some kind of graphic that shows how chips fluctuated in the space between broadcasted hands, or maybe even do a rapid-fire summary of the pots in between. Not to sound corny, but every hand matters at the final table of the WSOP, and every hand is interesting. Cutting the small pots out of the picture entirely harms the hands that are left to stay in ways that it’s impossible to appreciate when you’re viewing.

Another surprise I got while watching the ESPN broadcast was how tight Phil Ivey was really playing. It was apparent to the audience that he was picking his spots pretty conservatively, but when you see some of his hole cards (especially the JJ hand against Saout), it’s hard not to conclude he was playing a little too tight. On ESPN, you can also see and hear a bit more of Ivey’s frustration at being card-dead, but if you’re not going to go with JJ against Saout, who had been playing very aggressively, it’s hard to see what you’re waiting for. Most live viewers assumed Ivey was just on a steal or (given that he tanked, that Ivey had been raising a good amount the last few orbits, that the break began after that hand and that Saout had been quite agro with three-betting preflop) that he had a mediocre hand and was thinking about picking off Saout. I was genuinely shocked when I saw jacks on the replay.

I mentioned the issue of context when discussing Buchman’s disappearing act above, and I think it’s important to note another critical omission on the part of ESPN that further deprives the viewing audience of an accurate sense of how play actually occurred: chip counts. It’s terribly frustrating as a poker-playing viewer to not have those counts on the screen at any point during the hand (with the slim exception of being able to deduce the starting stacks from the all-in raise size), because without them it’s very tough to evaluate the quality of a play. Let’s be honest – armchair quarterbacking the play is 99% of the fun of watching, and not knowing stack sizes renders you pretty much unable to do so. It also strips out a lot of the drama involved – is this a big pot for a player? For both players? Obviously you find that out when they’re all in, but a sense of the pot building toward that point just makes each hand that much more dramatic, and also adds a variety of drama (something other than a preflop all in) that breaks up the predictability of the broadcast a bit.

There’s another casualty when context is so thoroughly excised, and it’s a subtle but important loss: the skill aspect of the game. You lose so much of the nuance of the game, the layers of strategy, the interesting shifts in momentum and table control when you ignore 90% of the hands played (and remove critical information from the hands you do show). You also severely limit what the announcers can discuss, essentially curtailing their analysis to include only hands and information available to the audience, which encourages a very surface analysis that does little (or nothing) to promote the skill aspect of poker. That aspect is all the more critical when you consider what hands ESPN tends to select – all in preflop hands where poker really does come down to the luck of the draw. I think this is the single biggest gap between the live game and the ESPN broadcast, and I don’t think it’s simply an unavoidable function of compressing the tournament down to a televisable chunk. Instead, I think the lack of apparent skill involved in the broadcast version is a direct result of how ESPN chooses to compress and present final table play.

Nowhere is that deficit more apparent than in the heads-up match between Cada and Moon. A majority of the final table broadcast paints Moon as the inexperienced amateur, and rightfully so – that’s what he is, and he made several head-scratching plays. However, Moon played excellently for the overwhelming majority of heads up play, and while ESPN two of his best instances of outplaying Cada it simply doesn’t capture just how (surprisingly) well Moon was playing, and how much skill was involved on both sides in a heads up match that took nearly a hundred hands to resolve. For anyone just casually observing, Cada’s comments regarding how tough Moon was playing might seem like tactical flattery or sarcasm. Anyone who watched the whole match, however, realizes that those compliments were issued with the purest sincerity possible by Cada who, until Moon’s insane misstep to end the match, was essentially fighting an uphill battle for a win many observers thought was a forgone conclusion. By boiling that down to eight hands, ESPN does a serious disservice to not only the viewer, but to poker in general. The world’s largest tournament should also serve as a showcase for the intellectual and psychological depth involved in the game, especially when you have a deep-stacked heads up match between two very dissimilar opponents. This year’s broadcast simply didn’t deliver.

Despite such criticism, ESPN deserves tons of credit for producing a difficult product under strenuous conditions, and the airing of the WSOP does more to ignite popular participation in the game of poker than any other single event – in fact, nothing even comes close. It’s inevitable that the WSOP played and the WSOP shown will end up being two very different animals. I just wish that the two shared a bit more genetic resemblance than they did this year.