review of espn's wsop coverage

We live in a very good time for poker. Between the World Poker Tour, and now the ESPN World Series of Poker program, there has never been better or more insightful poker coverage on TV.

Here are my thought's on last night's first episode of ESPN's WSOP coverage.

First, the production value is much higher than in past years. The commentation was good and in the typical sportscaster style of ESPN, which I prefer to the more conversational style of the World Poker Tour. Like the WPT, they actually also showed cards that weren't shown to other players, which is terrific.

The percentage favorite display they show during the hand is great. I think they should adopt the same thing for the World Poker Tour. They really should also show the current pot and bet size though.

I'm personally ambivalent about the personal profiles they showed during the episode. While I enjoy hearing about poker players' off-table lives, for a 1-hour episode it really detracted from the actual poker shown. But for making the show more accessible to a non-poker audience, I think they're right on the money. They were able to build a pretty nice side story about the tournament essentially being a battle of personalities, which in a lot of ways is what tournaments are about.

I was surprised not to hear any mention of some of the other big names in tournament poker like T.J. Cloutier, Layne Flack, Men Nguyen, John Juanda. Guess they'll discuss them in later episodes.

As far as the poker contained in the episode, again I felt there wasn't enough -- maybe ten hands? For the poker they did show, it was apparently the Robert Varkonyi show. If I did a shot for every time they said "Varkonyi" I'd be dead right now. Yes, he is the defending champion. Yes, he was at the "feature table". It just felt it was a little excessive.

On the other hand, the Varkonyi hands held some valuable lessons for how not to play WSOP poker. I'm sure there'll be enough dissing on Varkonyi on rec.gambling.poker so I'll minimize mine here. His two hands with aces were obviously played very poorly. I know the guy is not a hardcore pro, but his first hand was a textbook example of when not to slowplay. As for his bustout, well AA vs KK or set over set are the easiest ways to exit a no-limit tournament, so there probably wasn't much he could do. It does annoy me when players call huge bets with the worse hand, and then when their opponent turns over aces say "I knew it."

Overall, the program was excellent and I look forward to the next 6 weeks of programming!

As an aside, this program had some great quotes. Here are some of my favorites: