There aren’t many times a poker player wakes up at night in a cold sweat. But it dawned on me last night that I have to write this down. I need to say it here, just so it’s said. Just so that nobody can turn around years from now – if and when poker is judged – and say “but at the time no-one knew any different”. So I’ll say it:
Reporting on tournament poker as if the players are gladiators pitting irresistible, pure skill against each other, as if each hand is a plot point in some grand narrative, painting a picture of inexorable rise to destiny by the victor, as if – to put it bluntly – winning one tournament is a manifestation of skill, is absolute nonsense.
It’s such nonsense that it’s actually embarrassing; and it’s so embarrassing that it actually makes us look quite stupid. We don’t want to look stupid precisely because right now poker is under scrutiny. It’s under scrutiny because ranks of politicians, lawmakers and entrepreneurs are looking in from the Great Outside at our tiny niche, wondering how to regulate us, wondering what to do with us.
For plenty of these people, the prejudice is that poker is no different from any other form of gambling. Most of them will never have the time nor the inclination to put in the hours of spade work it takes to discover that poker is actually a skill game.
But in the brief time that they flirt with us, they will read our tournament reports. They will see that the same narrative is used to describe a bracelet winner’s battle heads up as was used to describe Nadal v Federer Wimbledon 2008. They will have learned enough in their brief dalliance with our game to see that such a comparison is utter and abject folly.
Just so we’re clear, poker is a skill game – even tournament poker. My point is that the time scale required to realise that skill is far too long to apply the classic narratives of sports journalism. In Nadal v Federer, it unfolded before our eyes. Yet the outcome of a skill differential in poker is more like the motion of a glacier – virtually invisible to the naked eye, but there all the same.
Take these three poker narratives as examples:
“He sat at home in front of a computer screen for fifty hours a week, and over months played hundreds of thousands of hands. Over that time, he ground out a win rate of 3BBs/100 hands”.
“He toured the circuit for years; hotel room after hotel room, flight after flight. Plenty of times he came close, only for fate to dash his hopes. But over a period of five years, he brought home a profit.”
“He raised with Ace-King. His opponent three-bet with Jacks, and he shoved, hitting an Ace on the turn to make himself chip leader.”
Comparing them directly almost seems comical. Yet it’s only the latter we tend to see in tournament reports. We’ve all been in this game for years now and we know better. You can almost detect the tiredness in many an author’s tone as they report on yet another set of hand match ups, yet another winner’s explanation of how they got to the top. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve done it; we’ve all done it.
I’m just calling for action from the powers that be (Pokernews, EPT, Poker Listings, WSOP, etc.) to think about changing their tone, and ordering the reporting in a different way. Just so I’m not accused of knocking down without building up again, here are some thoughts about how to improve poker journalism.
Give us the bare facts. Anyone who clicks a link to your site in order to find out what happened, wants to find out just that: what happened. That means England 2 Bulgaria 1, top of the page, standing out. Jerome Bradpiece is my mate. I’m clicking onto your site because it’s easier than trawling through Facebook or Twitter to find out that he came 5th and won €58k. That’s what I want to know.
I don’t care how he busted. I can guess he had one hand and his opponent had another, and that one of them won. That’s standard and I’ve heard it all before. In fact, even if it isn’t standard, it’s still standard, if you know what I mean.
I don’t care how the momentum changed either. Momentum does change in poker, but it’s almost always to do with the cards. Once again, it’s not like Nadal v Federer. How they react to momentum changes is definitive of champions. With poker that is merely illusion.
Interviews? By all means. But please don’t ask big picture questions about the tournament game flow, because the answer is, once again, largely about luck. Ask them about the hands where skill might have prevailed. Was that a bluff or a value bet? What did you put him on when he three-bet you? If I can get inside Ivey’s head there, that’s gold dust. That’s what I’m paying you for. We ask football players these questions and get pointless answers – largely because they are not known for their articulacy. But poker players are intelligent and sharp and can tell you exactly what they were thinking. Negreanu’s better than me at poker, I want to know what he did and why so that I can get better.
You want get flowery on me? Fine, tell me about the place. Tell me that everyone gets mugged in Barcelona and women are gorgeous in Tallinn, because I’m a poker player and I might go to these places myself. But for God’s sake don’t waste my precious time describing just another poker tournament in just another hotel because we have all, quite literally, been there before.
And here, for completeness, is a reminder of the kinds of narratives there can be in poker journalism which are not churning out the same crap day after day, but are in fact the musings of intelligent people living this life and trying to apply pen to paper, finger to keyboard, to make sense of it all.
Jesse May. It’s not just that it’s good old-fashioned journalism. It’s that, as I’ve said before, Jesse lives the life. He’s there, immersed in poker at the highest (or should that be lowest?) level. Jesse makes no apologies for what poker is – a game of gamblers and outrageous characters – and he paints it beautifully. You won’t find too many hand analyses here.
Neil Channing. In theory, Channing should be the worst journalist in history. Journalism is about being concise, yet if you speak to Channing about how his tournament went, you’re likely to get a 10,000-word dissertation. By some cosmic fluke, his writing is brilliantly concise. As with Jesse May, he is totally immersed in the game and is veritable sage on the subject.
Vicky Coren. One of the few poker journalists good enough to be published regularly in the mainstream press. Weekly, the onus is on her to have a point that people want to read, and she only has 250 words in which to do it. Poker journalists should read her column to see just how this discipline obtains every week, regardless of subject matter. Too much tournament poker blogging is filler. Saying something because we believe it should be said. Say something people want to hear. And do it briefly.
Addendum (added at 5:30pm Friday):
Having read the top three comments below and had a brief exchange with Dave Bland on Twitter, I need to clarify something.
The content of this post is almost exclusively aimed at after the fact, tournament summary reportage. The kind you might read in a magazine; as Dave puts it “Cliffs Notes” of the tournament; as Owen puts it below: “the macroscopic restrospectives”.
As I only intimated in the original post, I think the microscopic/live tournament update blog sites (such as the WSOP update site, Pokernews and Unibetopen.com) do a great job and are basically spot on with their coverage. Chip counts and quick, witty updates are what people need, and taking Unibetopen.com as an example, I think the work of Chris Hall, Dana Immanuel, Lee Davy etc. is great. Good journalism, delivering the facts with no fuss. And that’s a very tough job.
The macroscopic/after the fact blog is the one that I would change.
Just to answer Dave’s point on Twitter, yes – great calls with Ace-high or whatever are newsworthy, and I think they should be reported. It’s just that when a hand is standard, why bother reporting it?
On an interesting and perhaps even more controversial note, could we dispense with (mundane) hand analysis even in the live update blogs? I know I’m basically saying the equivalent of “nah! in football journalism you don’t need a blow-by-blow account of the goal, it’s only the fact that the goal’s scored that’s important.” But it seems as if live bloggers feel obliged to report the content of these hands even when they aren’t newsworthy. Should they feel so obliged?
Hello mate,
I really enjoyed reading this. I am busy working (on live tournament reporting rofl) so I will give you a more detailed response when I have time in the next few days.
Lee
I have to say that I think the Stars bloggers do a great job, and make a good effort of giving a little bit of everything. They’ll usually have one of them reporting hands with as much detail as possible, one will try to give the bigger picture of the atmosphere, they’ll try to tie the ’story’ of the tournament together, and they inject a little humour.
Also people look at the blogs for different reasons; it could be someone’s Mum or Aunty looking for a glimpse of their qualifier, it could be a low stakes grinder aspiring to get to play on a bigger stage some day, it could be a veteran tournament player that’s been there done that, or someone else entirely. They’ll each want something different from it.
I get your point about it not truly being the tale of the rightful champion’s triumph over adversity to be deservingly declared victorious. Tennis, you probably do get a deserving champion pretty much every time, but in football for instance, it’s only every other major championship where the truly best team in the competition wins; for every France in 98, or Argentina 86, or Brazil 70, there’s a Greece Euro champs, or a not classic German or Italian World Cup win.
I agree totally about the bloggers above and what a great job they do, but I’d also say that it’s a lot easier to do a macrocosmic retrospective tournament blog than it is to a microcosmic on the fly updates blog.
And on a related note: TV coverage of tournaments generally focuses on running out — but at a the pace of a crawl, not a run — the board after players get all in. If the directors and producers are correct, the audience is more interested in how the deck shuffle ended than in the strategy and tactics of play. Or as I sometimes have phrased it while playing in a tournament: now the poker’s over, so the TV crew comes to the table.
I’ve added an addendum in reply to these and other comments on twitter as of now. Please see above.
I have just closed my eyes and thought to myself, “what would it have been like to have read Manchester United’s 1999 Champions League triumph instead of watching it?”
At first I thought that it would not provide me with any interest, after all it has always been the visual stimuli of football that has piqued my interest. Then I thought about whether or not I would view the replay after reading the reports and of course I would have watched nothing but the last ten-minutes. Had the game been a little bit more exciting then I may have watched the whole thing. I suppose my point is the scribe does have the opportunity to try and transfer the excitement from pitch/table – written word – audience.
Then I had another thought from the bad old days when I was gambling. Back when I had a vested interest in the outcome of a match, (irrespective of what sport) and I couldn’t view it on TV, I would read all sorts of blogs and reports on the Internet. I would love reading these reports and finding out how my team was doing but I suppose you are correct when you say it is all about the result. My excitement came around because of the point, goal or race that was won. If my horse won I didn’t care if the scribe told me how it won as long as I knew it had won.
Another memory and another point. When I was younger I was a budding little footballer. I used to love it when I read my name in the newspaper (no internet back then!) Not only did I like to read, “7th Reddish beat New Mills four-nil and Lee Davy scored three,” but I also reveled in the description of how I scored those goals. I have no idea if poker players feel like this or not, but it is always in my mind when I try to write about them and this is why I try to make it as colourful as possible (when time permits).
So I suppose there are a lot of people who will like these colourful little blogs and a lot of people who just think, “Christ get to the point.” I do not think it will flow all one way or the other though.
As a new reporter myself (one year) I can tell you that if I started one year ago and just got to the point I wouldn’t have secured any work. Even one year on, if I get to the point, I will probably lose the work I have to more colourful writers. Competition is healthy and as a writer we cannot simply do what you want us to do. I agree that the people who run the websites could direct us to write in your preferred style and there are actually sites that do this. When I cover the WPT in Europe they want you to just report on the hands. They don’t mind a little bit of colour but they prefer hand descriptions and chip counts. Almost as though every post has a mandatory look to it. So I agree if this is what the public wants the owners can make it happen. But is this what the public wants? I don’t know because the owners of these websites never ask for any feedback from the people who read the tournament reports. This is simple business sense but something that has not got through to the poker world.
Then you have the reporters ourselves. You are a writer yourself so you should understand this. We don’t all think when we write. We just write. Words come out naturally and we all have our own styles. I don’t like being told what to do. I like my writing to go with the flow. If I had to produced mandatory reports (and I do for other businesses) then I think I would be quickly looking for other work.
I don’t the reports are comical or stupid and I am certainly not embarrassed by anything I write. Some people do care how people bust. You didn’t care how Bradfield busted but I have hundreds of poker players asking me all the time. Funnily enough, as I was reading your post the Devilfish came over and asked me HOW Sam Trickett busted. I said, “he came 4th”. He said, “I asked HOW!”
I like your point about the interviews and I guess it is a little like football referees. They make a lot of mistakes because they don’t have an in depth knowledge of the game and maybe the same is true for poker interviews. This is something I will work on myself. The poker players can help here as well. Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth while other times it can be easy as turning a key; it depends on the personality.
Last but not least neither Jesse May, Neil Channing nor Vicky Coren have to earn a living writing about tournament poker. If they did you would probably find that their reports would be the same flowery bullshit that you don’t like. Vicky Coren’s 250-word article is a good example of what constraints can do for writing. You say you like it, I say it bores me to tears. I know she is an excellent writer because I have read her book, but the column she writes just doesn’t do it for me because she is constricted by word count. Something judging by this reply I am obviously not!
Keep up the good work.
Maybe I should have read the addendum! Nevertheless I think my response debates some of the questions you raise in the addendum about the live reports.
Thanks for the detailed response Lee.
I must say there are a number of risks I took with this post, not the least of which is, as the racist protests, “but some of my best friends are bloggers”.
I really didn’t take enough time in the original text to delineate between the 14-hour days put in by live bloggers creating tight, factual reports which are pretty much spot-on what people want read while the tournament is taking place, and the same old rubbish which populates the summary (after the fact) tournament reports on websites and in magazines which is basically filler.
I’ll say it again because it’s important to me that I don’t offend people like yourself, Chris, Dana, Snoopy, KevMath and so on. Websites like the WSOP and EPT live update are brilliant. They’re easy to navigate, have an abundance of relevant information, and when they do have textual updates, they’re concise and well written.
I concede your point about people wanting to know bust out hands. In fact, I think my comparison with how a goal is scored holds out: at the end of the day, it’s all sport, it’s all drama and we have to report it.
Your point about the WPT wanting hand analysis (only) is exactly what I wanted to hear. If anything, I posted this blog as a call to arms for those employing the writers, not the writers who work for them. Of course, being the diligent souls they are, it’s the writers who have taken me up on it. But if I’ve got one writer to call this into question, then the risk I took was worth it: I really want to start a conversation about this.
Combining the points in the last two paragraphs, I guess I’m saying that – notwithstanding that people still need to know bust-out hands and feel compelled to find out about the nuts and bolts of a tournament – we can still put our heads together to agree about creating better content in tournament reports (both live and after the fact).
One last point. When I called out Jesse, Neil and Vicky as writers, I meant for bloggers to look at the narratives they use and try to learn from them – to try to add them to the lexicon of narratives which they use for their writing. I’m asking bloggers/websites to look a lot deeper here at how we actually report about poker and whether the standard narrative is relevant (I have to say, Lee, that one of the reasons you’ve been so successful this year is precisely because you’re prepared to stick your neck out and say something different in a live update blog). Sure, it seems obvious that we have to use the drama of an unfolding hand to mark the tension of the occasion when live blogging, but after the fact in a tournament summary? There’s so much more going on. Just read any one of Neil’s blogs about a tournament and you can see that what actually happened in a hand is a tiny portion of what’s going on in a poker player’s head.
We’ve been saying for years that poker is about more than just what happened in an individual hand. It’s about time we got together to discuss how we as writers can create the narratives to bring that to the readers/audience.
Alex,
I know that there is a lot more going on inside the poker players head when they are making their decisions at the poker table, but this is very difficult to report on. We are only supposed to report facts and not make assumptions. I think the missing key ingredient here is a quick two-minute chat with the player post hand, but this is nigh on impossible during a tournament. The organisers are making it even more difficult for this to happen as well. At this years WSOP I was told I could not speak to the players which is absurd.
So I think at the moment we have what we have – which is not a bad product. I do think the whole live reporting concept should be re-evaluated but the companies who employ messrs Immanuel, Pitt, Hall, et al do not seem to be that bothered. I think this boils down to a lack of business acumen. Maybe we have poker sites run by poker enthusiasts and not necessarily people with cute business minds.
1. Who reads the live reports?
2. When we find out who reads them ask them how they want their information delivered.
3. Create a way to deliver what they want.
4. Deliver it
5. Ask for feedback
6. Listen and review feedback and make more changes.
Once again, for live reporting I can see the difficulties, and I have no complaints really – the system does give people what they want, and the guys who do it are great at their jobs. The new rulings at the WSOP were dreadful and another overreaction by the powers that be.
For tournament summaries, only a few (key) hands are needed, and it’s relatively easier to get the interview to ask the player what happened. Suffice to say, most flips don’t need a story . . .
I honestly do think that the product we’re giving people is maturing. I’m not the only one who thinks things have to change (as the reactions to this blog have shown). For a while Barry Carter used the hashtag #manwinspokertournament on twitter. I’m sure there’s at least an ounce of cynicism there. And journalists themselves are clearly getting bored of producing the same story for each tournament report (and for live reporting too? apologies, but I don’t know because I don’t do it), so I do think things are changing. I just wanted to flag up the directions in which I think those changes should go.
yaaaaay someone noticed my hashtag.
I think Lee has made some very good points, especially about understanding the audience. Not enough work has been done, by anyone in the industry, about understanding the demographics that read the poker media.
Now plenty of work has been done about who watches poker TV shows, and in those instances, the arm chair fans who don’t really play much but know who the Devilfish is, outweighs us poker enthusiasts about 10-1. So therefore such coverage where everyone is saying ‘wow what a call with 2nd pair, that Paul Zimbler is the greatest’ is understandable.
But who reads poker media? I think that demographic is made up of those of us who are already immersed in poker.I don’t think we necessarily need to have what is written to be massively built up.
Personally I don’t want to know every hand, or write about every hand. But I know a lot of players that do. I know people who will dissect hands for fun all day long, who really do want all the details of a players downfall/victory.
The one thing I have been involved in studying a lot is how often people stay on a particular web page, and most of the time, your average reader does not even bother using the scroll button. This is also why its important to get all the #manwinspokertournament stuff right at the very top of the page.
With regards to Alex’s comments about the product maturing, he is spot on, but not the tournament coverage product – poker media in general. Regrettably for most, I guess thankfully for those of us who write, poker is mainstream news these days and there is so many interesting things to write about. Regrettably tournament coverage is possibly one of the elements that hasn’t really changed all that much – its still usually some young guy fresh out of college who turned pro 18 months ago that wins it.
As for live reporting. What we have found more than anything from direct feedback is that what people want to know is A) Details of their friends and B) Details of the big names – not much else than that. Your average reader really does want to hear about how much Durrrrr soul read a guy or how Hellmuth butchered short stack strategy, but beyond that I’m not sure they want the same level of coverage for player x vs player Y.
Live tournament reporting is a thankless chore at times. I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, not much structure to the points I have made, but ultimately I think Lee is right when he suggested we should get more feedback from the audience – whoever they are.
[...] poker friend of mine and very good blogger, Alex Rousso of Unibet Poker, wrote a blog last week where he suggested that tournament reporting was over the top. That most people did not want to [...]