Celebrity Poker Showdown, Take Two

One of the latest pebbles to ripple the surface of pokerdom is a recent piece appearing in that bastion of higher reporting, the New York Post. In the piece, writer Peter Lauria sounds the drums-o'-doom for poker as a no-longer-hot, no-longer-cool activity. Like we haven't heard that one.


Lauria cites both the recent Diet Pepsi commercial, featuring Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth and Scotty Nguyen, and the decline in viewership of a couple of long-running poker broadcasts as evidence of poker's decline, and dutifully digs up his own talking head to spout nonsense facts for the sake of the story.


(As an aside, in the commercial above, Negreanu looks a bit too uncomfortably like one of our favorite "Adult Swim" characters --- an unfortunate instance of what happens when people with pointed chins wear goatees... and don't have their agents screen the results.)

Of course, Lauria's piece is just page-fillerin' pap, but Lauria gets the creds for one thing --- it turns out he used "jumping the shark" and "Celebrity Poker Showdown" in the same piece just a couple of days before I did.

The shame of it all. I are besmirched. By a Post writer, no less.

Thank God the coincidences end there. Were I to write a poker piece that begged any pretense of seriousness, the last thing I would do would be to use as my leading statistic an overview of the decline in viewership of "Celebrity Poker Showdown" as viable evidence of poker's waning popularity. Yes, and because "Full House" ran for eight seasons and 192 episodes, it's one of the most seminal examples of American comedy.

Mark Twain said it better, when he popularized Benjamin Disraeli's famous quotation on "lies, damned lies and statistics." [With a thank-you to reader Michael Albert, for clarifying the source (see comments below) -- CB.] Or maybe Stan Lee's more your taste: "'Nuff Said."

Frankly, your faithful blogger can't stop laughing --- not only at the lameness of the Post piece, but at a couple of the snipes at the inky turd by a couple of poker-blogging biggees, Wil Wheaton and Bill Rini. Genuine outrage --- or even the pretense thereof --- is simply misplaced at uninformed, wipe-your-ass-with-it hackwork such as this. (And I'm referring to the Post crap, not to Bill's or Wil's stuff, which I respect and read often.)

Talking heads are talking heads for a reason; the game involves filling the page, selling ads and papers, and beginning the cycle anew. It doesn't matter if the writer knows a damn thing about the topic at hand (as, clearly, Lauria doesn't), as long as the piece is done with reasonable skill or follows the tried-and-true formula used in such matters. All it has to do is generate interest, which in turn generates dollars. And Lauria seems to have succeeded on that count rather well.

Normally, it wouldn't be worth a mention. But my thanks for the good belly laugh to all involved.