Word: pokerful
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JOHNNY CASH His was not the rocker's shriek but the dark, deep voice of a man counting out his demons and his losses with the stoicism of a poker player dealt a bum hand. A look at his legacy...
...Poker was first broadcast on television in 1993, but it wasn't until 2002 that the game became watchable. In No Limit Texas Hold 'Em (the preferred game of the poker cognoscenti), players are dealt two cards that only they can see, called "hole cards," and then five more community cards are placed in the middle of the table. According to Lon McEachern, the play-by-play guy on World Series, watching Hold 'Em without seeing the hole cards "was like having McEnroe and Boris Becker playing Wimbledon in the dark, then turning on the lights after the point...
Steven Lipscomb, creator of the World Poker Tour, changed all that by embedding a lipstick camera in each player's table position. Suddenly, when the players tilted their cards up for a surreptitious glance, they also flashed the TV audience, who then got to watch them lie to the other stone-faced liars at the table. "We made this into a spectator sport," says Lipscomb. "Now when you watch a World Poker Tour show, you feel like you're in the seat making a million-dollar decision on every hand...
Both TV shows help you see how analytical and brassy the best players are by displaying the odds of victory as the cards are dealt. And whether or not you've played poker (and more than 50 million Americans have), it's thrilling to see a guy with zip bluff $300,000 out of someone with a pair of kings. The difference between the shows is that ESPN has the superior event. World Poker Tour is made-for-TV entertainment, whereas the World Series has been an annual event at Binion's since 1970. Anyone who posts...
...Then they added play-by-play in postproduction. "You don't see everything they play," says McEachern. "You see a representative number of hands, exciting hands, to be TV friendly." In between the action, there are refreshingly cheese-free player profiles introducing the likes of Annie Duke, the top poker-playing woman, who came in 10th in 2000 while eight months' pregnant; Dutch Boyd, a math genius who went to college at age 12; and Chris (Jesus) Ferguson, a graduate student at UCLA who can slice a banana with a thrown playing card from 50 ft. away...