I just caught an episode of Celebrity Poker from the new season and if the rest of the season is anything like this show . . . I’m going to be watching. Last season was disappointing. Last season was episode after episode of six celebrities who knew nothing about poker sitting around and boring the audience for an hour or so (I could have sworn last season was only an hour. This season is two hours.). It was like going to a local casino and watching a $1/$2 table. There was the occassional non-rookie like Ben Affleck but even the people who said they knew how to play were playing so poorly that the show was painful to watch.
This season has started out very different. You had Jerome Bettis, Rosario Dawson, Mena Suvari, Wanda Sykes, and Travis Tritt seated with Phil Gordon and Kids in the Hall funnyman Dave Foley hosting. I will have to say that last year’s host Kevin Pollak seemed to be more of a poker insider than Dave Foley but Dave doesn’t distract too much.
Anyway, we still had the newbies this year. Sykes and Dawson at times didn’t even seem like they understood the game. Interestingly, they were the final two players. Bettis and Tritt seemed like they could hold their own and Mena seemed like the table shark. In other words, it was like a loose/passive table at many casinos. And, in part, that’s why I liked this game. You got a chance to see good play against maniac play. That’s one of the frustrations with reading poker advice from pros. They play against other pros. No pro would hold 72o to the river (with no pair) calling bets all the way. But that happens at the lower limits all the time. And way too many times they pull a 7 on the river beating your AKs that didn’t pair up. Yeah, yeah, if they keep playing like that the odds say that they’re going to lose it all but for some reason that odds correction never seems to happen when you’re at the table against them. 🙂
It was instructional to watch Bettis get blown off two hands when he had the winning hand. Both hands he was up against the newbies (Sykes and Dawson) and they probably thought they had the best hand. Granted, he played both hands incorrectly but I think a big part of learning how to do something correctly is to watch people do it incorrectly. It was a shame too because he seemed to play the tougher hands a lot better but when he had a hand like two pair he let himself get bluffed out by someone holding medium pair.
Mena was the heartbreaker though. She was playing tight, aggressive poker but she just ran up against the wrong hands which, in itself, is a lesson for people who find themselves at the table with loose players like Sykes and Dawson. She mentioned in the interviews that she plays poker pretty seriously and the camera would always pause on her after the cards were dealt so you could see her eyeing all the other players before even looking at her cards. She had a stone-cold poker face and she was making some moves that suggested she actually knew how to use position at the table. Her best move was making Bettis count down his chips before she bet so she could post a bet that would put him all in if he called.
This was by no means a night of great poker but it was a night of poker like most of us mere poker mortals might see online or at the local casino. The level of experience was pretty mixed up and it just seemed more like the kinds of games I find myself in.
I will have to say, on the entertainment side, I would watch this one again just for the table banter. I think Sykes is one of the funniest women in the biz and she certainly didn’t disappoint on this evening. Some of her more classic lines were when Bettis was short stacked and was thinking about his cards she looked over and said “The loser lounge ain’t that bad. Go ahead.” On another hand when Tritt was playing around with his chips thinking about a bet she said “Come on. You spend more money than that on tobacco.” Tritt replied “Just remember, nobody has ever died from second hand spit,” to which Sykes shot back “Well it depends on which mother f*cker you get it on. Somebody get some spit on me and there’s going to be a homicide.”
All and all, at least for this episode, I give the new season a thumbs up.