Celtic said:
Poker might be second to me as a game but given the choice of watching poker or pool I will watch poker because the way they present it is so much better. I am kinda pissed off about it all, I KNOW I could make a pool tournament that would garner huge television appeal but we instead have suits that are running the show and screwing it up. Put me in the drivers seat and I can make a pool tourney that has more television appeal then anything previously released. Pool could learn alot by the way poker is marketing itself.
Well said, Celtic.
Taking in the personalities of the poker players is half the fun in poker. The player profiles and interviews are fascinating. During a poker hand, they can be stoic, aggressive, passive, quiet, or talkative. When the hand is over, they can be openly elated, devastated, overwhelmed, disgusted. Another thing I really like about poker is that the announcers are objective. They don't hesitate to praise or knock down the individual decisions of the players. They give you a sense when a player has done something brilliant, creative, wreckless or stupid. When a player makes a mistake, they give it some context (inexperienced, still "hot" over that last hand, "out to get" a certain player). They'll tell you that a player bested another in the last poker event and that a revenge motive is in play or that "these two have never much like each other." Such comments hieghten our interest in the game. Between the the demonstrative animation of the players and the objective critique of the announcers, I get a great sense of the game's psychology, and the game's psychology is fascinating.
But pool has all these elements, too. Televised pool, unfortunately, focuses on the shots, and rarely on the personalities of the players, and nearly never on the game's psychology. The human element is missing from pool telecasts.
The player interviews and profiles leave you nearly in the dark. Far too many pool players act like robots in televised play. When did you last hear an announcer call a player's shot selection to be flat-out wrong? On the contrary, very modest accomplishments are lauded as extraordinary by the pool announcers. Mitch Laurance will watch someone execute a shot that most good players would have at least a 95% success rate on and call it extraordinary or comment that it's a shot he's always struggled with. Is this what we need to hear? Scholars of the game who make it to the microphone are usually nearly as bad, focusing on the good and covering up the bad in a way that it far from objective. When a scholar of the game sees a player making an ill-advised shot and says nothing, it's really disheartening.
Those of us that have been around pool for a while know that pool players have lots of personality, that they can be demonstratively animated during the play, that they play mind games with their opponents, that they do the right and wrong things for a variety of different reasons, that their behavior may vary from rack to rack and match to match, etc. We also know that this make them fascinating to us as much as their superb play. Nobody who watches pro pool on TV only knows it, though, because televised pool drains the game of all of its human elements.
Trust me, Celtic, there are suits behind pro poker, too. It's just that they, unlike pool's suits, understand the importance of the human element in their game and stage a production that ensures that the focus is on the personalities and on the psychology of poker, and not just on the cards dealt.
If the focus were on the cards only, televised poker would be every bit as dull as televised pool.
