People often draw parallels between pool and poker, and I believe that there are some similarities, but then they ask "how can poker be so popular and pool be so unpopular". I'm not a poker player myself, but I do have a theory about this. First off, it doesn't seem to be poker in general that's popular on tv, only hold 'em. I don't think televised 5-card draw would attract nearly the audience, for obvious reasons. This presents a problem in itself, because nine-ball is, in my mind, more akin to 5-card draw than hold 'em.
Hold 'em has all of these exciting twists & turns because of the gradual flipping of cards, and all of the different possible poker hands, not to mention the potential for bluffing. A game of nine-ball, on the other hand, is usually over long before the 9 is actually made, and very rarely has any sort of late-game drama. As a hand of hold 'em progresses, the the stakes climb dramatically, the tension rises, and I suspect that professional poker players would say that the difficulty increases as well. In contrast, 9-ball generally gets much easier as the game progresses, and any difficult, tension-filled shots will likely be shot early in the rack, often making the ending anticlimactic. Essentially, 9-ball has no river card.
In addition to this stuff, of course, is the fact that poker players play so many more hands that they can edit out all of the "boring" hands before it's taken to the screen. It's hard to cut much out when you're racing to 5
I don't have any answers, obviously, but it almost seems like we need a game that gets more difficult as it progresses instead of the other way around. There can't be many pool games like that, although some might argue that one-pocket is that way.
Aaron
Hold 'em has all of these exciting twists & turns because of the gradual flipping of cards, and all of the different possible poker hands, not to mention the potential for bluffing. A game of nine-ball, on the other hand, is usually over long before the 9 is actually made, and very rarely has any sort of late-game drama. As a hand of hold 'em progresses, the the stakes climb dramatically, the tension rises, and I suspect that professional poker players would say that the difficulty increases as well. In contrast, 9-ball generally gets much easier as the game progresses, and any difficult, tension-filled shots will likely be shot early in the rack, often making the ending anticlimactic. Essentially, 9-ball has no river card.
In addition to this stuff, of course, is the fact that poker players play so many more hands that they can edit out all of the "boring" hands before it's taken to the screen. It's hard to cut much out when you're racing to 5
I don't have any answers, obviously, but it almost seems like we need a game that gets more difficult as it progresses instead of the other way around. There can't be many pool games like that, although some might argue that one-pocket is that way.
Aaron
). And most of all, I don't want my poolroom full of people who think they are on trick shot magic or sudden death 7-ball, or worse, any of the new shows which would portray pool in an even more ludicrous manner.