Stuck on the tube last night catching the debut of Fox Sports Net's "Calvin Ayre Wild Card Poker," your blogger realized that there's been a marked uptick in ads promoting the next big poker thing from FOX, the "Poker Dome Challenge" co-sponsored by Mansionpoker.net.
We're within 30 days of this program's May 15 debut, which explains the surge in ads... so what the heck, let's preview the concept. Chops and the gang over at Wicked Chops Poker have a decent blurb on the thing, including a link to a New York Times article on the show that blipped under this blogger's radar. Actually, the Times piece is a wonder of promotional hyperbole, a definite improvement over the first release, which you can check on here.
The planned 43 episodes of "Poker Dome Challenge" will be broadcast from the Neonopolis, a downtown-Vegas shopping mall. The players themselves will be enclosed in a one-way-mirrored "studio," and the players will wear heart-rate monitors, so their adrenaline surges (and how well they disguise them) can be broadcast to the viewers. Onlookers can see in, but the players themselves can't look out; it's something of a gonzo version of PokerEveryman's supposed dream: a railside seat to the "fishtank" action at the Bellagio. Oh, and this is a "speed"-style event, too: players have only 15 seconds to make each decision about their cards.
The Fox mouthpiece cited by the Times claims that the speed format will allow 80-100 hands an hour of play, though this is, of course, garbage --- 30-40 is a feasable live-action max. (And we're not counting what it's edited to, either.) Assuming they have real cards and chips, they're just not going to get past the inherent time cost for the physical operation of the game.
But the gem of the Times piece, in terms of thought, is this quote: "I do think that poker is one of the most durable and cost-effective forms of programming in television," said George Greenberg (the FOX talking head). This is so-o-o-o-o true. Live poker, in fact, is the modern equivalent of the game show, with historically similar low overhead costs when measured on a per-episode basis. That the players themselves often pony up the "prize money" is just the icing on the cake, from the televisors' and promoters' standpoint, and that's a theme you'll often hear big-name players talk about as they consider their own roles in the future of televised poker.
What's funny about bizarre formats like "Poker Dome" or the Extreme Poker Challenge (Robert Varkonyi just won the second of these things, triumphing in a cold-cold-cold northern Finnish setting), is that they come a lot closer to fulfilling the artificial-reality needs of "reality show" programming than say, the "Everybody Loves Calvin" smoochfest (and attendant lawsuit) that was detailed in this blog's previous post.
But it's doubtful we've seen the strangest concepts yet. And as each new thing comes along, we get a little bit further from the core of the matchup that electrified poker fans in the first place.
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