Comments on: Cirque du Poker?

By: Kevin Mathers

Kevin Mathers — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:58:14 +0000

This was the “Extreme Poker” concept that Gavin Smith was talking about earlier in the series.

The way I read it, there’ll be two pros for each show, 6 members of the studio audience, with the rest of the audience making up the 9th player.

I guess some of the pros are buying into it because it’ll help mainstream poker, because it looks like the shows are going to have an extremely fast format. The Tuesday/Thursday shows are 3 hours apart, so not a lot of “small ball” poker will be played.

I don’t see the show continuing on January 1, 2009.

By: California Jen

California Jen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:59:19 +0000

BJ, I put the over/under on a dozen shows before it gets canceled. I have a feeling we won’t see anything near 16,000 performances!

By: California Jen

California Jen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:57:47 +0000

Oh my.

It sounds a little like the Price is Right…with poker. Instead of Bob Barker, we have Scotty Nguyen. And the audience participation? “Bob, I’d like to make a raise.”

By: BJ Nemeth

BJ Nemeth — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:38:44 +0000

Oh, and that grand prize of “ONE MILLION DOLLARS”? Forty players get to draw five cards each (presumably from separate decks), and if any of them pull a natural royal flush, they win the million dollars.

Good luck. The odds of getting a royal flush in five cards is about 650,000-to-1. Oh, I’m sorry. In this case that would be about 650,000-to-40, or roughly 16,000-to-1. Think it will run for 16,000 performances?

By: BJ Nemeth

BJ Nemeth — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:34:26 +0000

I don’t fully understand how this is going to work. It seems like the pros that they have listed represent a group, from which only two of them will actually be playing “live.” It also sounds like they could theoretically be playing remotely from home (online), and still be considered “live” as long as it is actually them.

I’m also not certain that their list of pros doesn’t include other, less marketable names. It’s hard to tell if the list of pros in their press release is the *entire* list. I wonder which two players would show up the most.

Finally, I’m generally not a fan of trademarked names that include punctuation*, like Guess?, Yahoo!, or The Real Deal!. Why must they always shout their name like that?

I’m curious — not a lot, but a little — to see if this ultimately plays out like a game show or a pseudo-poker tournament.