BetFair’s live updates page is really, really weird. There is room on the page for only one update (the most recent), but room for *SEVEN* Twitter messages from random people. To scroll through past updates, you have to click for each and every update, one at a time. Yuck! I definitely prefer the live updates format at PokerNews.com. (FYI, it is the exact same content on both sites, provided by PokerNews reporters.)

Personally, I’ve been very frustrated by the live updates. It seemed to be nearly hand-for-hand coverage for a while, but it’s completely fallen apart during the heads-up battle. Just because there aren’t any big pots doesn’t mean there isn’t any action.

It’s like watching a pitcher’s duel in baseball. The casual fan says there is no action because there haven’t been any big hits or runs scored. But the hard-core fans are riveted, and would never be satisfied with inning-by-inning updates that simply said, “Nothing important happened. The score is still zero to zero.”

How many reporters do they need? I’ve spent most of my tournament reporting career doing hand-for-hand updates by myself, including some marathon events that lasted until sunrise.

Even if they feel that the action is too quick for them to provide regular hand-for-hand updates, there are other ways of reporting the action to keep the readers informed on a timely basis. In the last 30 minutes of the last blind level, about half of the updates were about how hard it was to keep up with the fast action. The reporters should never be the story.

Thankfully, the reporting seems to have picked up a bit after that 20-minute break.

The security issue received one sentence and a parenthetical, which could have easily been posted between hands. That’s certainly no excuse for poor coverage of the actual event.

Dan, I don’t feel any need for 4-6 photos per hour, at least from the tournament reporters. What kind of photos would you like to see? Do you think they would aid in following the action? (I’m asking these questions with a straight face; consider it market research for my own job.)

Sure, if PokerNews had an unlimited budget, it’d be fantastic if they had a professional photographer on hand whose only job was to capture great, emotional photos and post them as quickly as possible. But their tournament-reporting budget has been heading in the wrong direction lately, so that’s rather unrealistic. (And as long as we’re being unrealistic, why not ask for streaming video?)

The Twitter thing, in and of itself, doesn’t bother me that much. (I can just ignore it.)

But leaving enough room for only *one* live update? If two are posted in quick succession, how would I know that I missed one without clicking back through them? One update by itself provides no context.

“It amuses me, BJ, how you, as a great poker photog, often tend to dismiss the impact of a powerful image!”

Believe me, if I were there, I’d be doing nothing but capturing “powerful images” to post. But nobody had the budget to send me. My disagreement with you isn’t that photos aren’t valuable, I just feel that they are less valuable than being able to follow the action. I’d rather listen to a baseball game live on the radio than get six photos an hour with inning-by-inning updates.

In a perfect world, yes, have plenty of photos. (Throughout my reporting career, I’ve fought for this.) But if the budget is capped and resources have to be prioritized, let me know what’s happening first. One photo of each player (so I can recognize who they are) is enough — more than that is a bonus.

Also, the fact that this event is respected by the players and it rewards the winner with a big pile of money has nothing to do with whether or not these bracelets are counted the same as Vegas WSOP bracelets. WPT events give out more money than every non-$40K+ preliminary WSOP event, and they all come with bracelets — but we don’t count them toward career bracelet totals. Why not? Because they’re different. Not less respected, just different. (If anything players respect a WPT title more than they do a prelim WSOP bracelet.)

The WSOP is different than the WSOP-E. That’s all I’m saying. If Negreanu wins tonight, in his heart of hearts he’ll know that he still hasn’t won the WSOP Main Event.

If you want to count major victories as a new stat, that’s fine. But counting all major victories (WSOP, WPT, EPT, WCOOP, etc.) as “bracelets” the way that Hellmuth or Harrah’s tracks them is just silly. You’re trying to redefine the language that’s already in heavy usage. Good luck with that.

Djinn = Jennifer Mason. She’s actually a very good tournament reporter that I like a lot. (She used to work for Blonde Poker out of Europe.) She’s also a fairly accomplished poker player in her own right:

Profile on Jen:
http://blondepoker.com/blondepedia/blondepedia_view_player.php?player_id=198

I actually thought the balance of coverage back in the “old days” (2005) was very good. You had me at Card Player providing hand-for-hand live updates at the final table, you had Jen Creason at PokerWire providing nothing but big hands and chip counts (highlights), and you had Mike Paulle at PokerPages providing a more colorful, personal description of the action in a blog format.

I agree 100% that hand-for-hand updates are *not* for everyone. But when it comes to the biggest events, I consider it to be part of the historical record. These are the final tables that the hard-core fans want to break down, stats-wise. We want to see how Daniel Negreanu won, or how he lost — and highlights aren’t enough to tell that story.

My feeling is that good hand-for-hand updates are accessible by everyone, even if it’s more information than the casual fans need. (I’d love hand-for-hand updates with a static “Here’s the Current Situation” update to bring new viewers quickly up to speed — but I don’t get to design the websites.)

Check out some of the recent final table coverage at WorldPokerTour.com. I’ll put that up against anything that isn’t streaming video — and in a lot of cases, you’ll get more information out of our coverage. (Lots of fans in the WPT stands follow our coverage on their smartphones, because it gives them a better idea of what’s going on even though they are in the same room.)

I don’t think Dan has a firm understanding of how many hands are shown during televised final tables.

No disrespect intended, Pauly, but I was thinking of early 2005, before the WSOP. Once the WSOP came around, the number of tournament reporters expanded to include Tao of Poker and a few others (many of which didn’t last long).

At the dawn of live tournament coverage, there were only three of us — Jen Creason, Mike Paulle, and me — and we were the only reporters at every major tournament in the U.S. (WPT, WSOP, WSOP Circuit). That was 3-4 tournaments per month, back when the field sizes were exploding so quickly that days *never* ended before midnight.

The three of us were very conscious in our counter-programming of each other, even if our bosses weren’t. The three of us respected each other and openly helped each other, and we all felt that our websites were filling different needs/preferences for the fans at home. I didn’t mind at all if people preferred PokerWire’s headline-style updates over Card Player’s thorough hand-for-hand, nor did I mind if they preferred Mike Paulle’s blog-style updates.

In my example above, I wasn’t trying to give a history lesson so much as I was trying to make a point about different reporting styles, looking back to a time when the differences were clear and obvious. (Like when there were only 3 major TV networks.)

I would *never* leave the Tao of Poker out of a historical look at tournament reporting. (Or a current look, for that matter.)

Since this comment thread is already hugely long, and pretty much on-topic for the tournament while it’s in play, can we move this discussion to the post where Barry Shulman is declared the winner? I have a lot to say on this, and I expect others do to.

You can find my comments here:
http://pokerati.com/2009/10/02/shulman-wins-wsop-e-negreanu-becomes-all-time-tournament-money-winner-semi-renegade-video-of-the-knockout-blows/#comments

By the way, and I need to bring this to our web team, but twitter is far more efficient for quick hand by hand coverage than any CMS in existence right now. I was using a widget off my mac, and it was utterly instantaneous. Now if it only allowed more than 140 characters, there would have been far fewer cliff hangers.