It is my understanding that playing poker for money used to be hard; you either needed to know of a local game or live close to a casino. Playing at a casino is intimidating: For a first-timer even going to the cashier and physically getting chips is intimidating, and the smallest stakes spread at a casino were still relatively large. Being able to play online freerolls or play money from the comfort of your own living room– maybe if you really wanted to splurge, you’d play a $0.01/$0.02 game, where a bad night might mean losing $12– relieved the negative pressures of inconvenience, intimidation, and stakes. There were lots of sites giving away free money, soft games, and no regulations, of course poker exploded.
Poker remains a very popular game and is in the middle of a live tournament upswing, but it’s still mostly played for small stakes at home or bar games. A $100 Orleans Daily is more professionalized than 90% of poker played in the world. If the poker world wants to grow, it needs to convert home game players into $100 Orleans daily players, into $400 Colossus players, and so on. So how do you go about doing that? I don’t know and many in the industry are suggesting all sorts of ideas, but I can tell you a certain meme going around poker circles that I am skeptical of, that the thing poker needs to create a second boom is a streaming hit like The Queen’s Gambit or Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
The streaming battles are intense, and even some of the biggest companies in the world, like Disney, Apple, and Amazon, are struggling to attract viewers for the streaming networks they’ve poured billions of dollars into. The reason why The Queen’s Gambit and Drive to Survive gained so much cultural cachet was not because they met some unsatiated public demand for content about chess and F1, but because they were very good shows created by talented directors and producers. The executive producer behind Drive to Survive, James Gay-Rees’s very first producing credit on a documentary was for the Oscar-nominated Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. He followed that up by producing with Asif Kapadia’s Senna, and then for Netflix produced another Asif Kapadia film, Amy, that won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Scott Frank, the creator and director of The Queen’s Gambit, is a lauded veteran screenwriter who previously had the top or sole writing credits on Out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan, and many more.
It would be very nice if skilled filmmakers had an interest in poker and made a poker series that was popular and critically acclaimed that increased interest in poker, but a prerequisite for the creation of anything of quality is that talented people have a real interest in what they’re making. Once that happens, there are still a million hurdles to overcome, and once that happens, it’s still a crapshoot if it becomes popular.1 You can’t will popularity into existence, and saying all poker needs is a hit show is engaging in magical thinking– all the biggest companies in the world are trying to make hit shows and mostly failing to do so. Hoping there is a big show about your industry is a pipe dream. Drive to Survive has been the biggest success for Box to Box Films, but they’ve also made series about the PGA Tour (successful and still running), surfing (cancelled after two seasons), Tour de France (cancelled after three seasons), tennis (cancelled after two seasons), rugby (cancelled after two seasons), and have horse racing, SEC Football, and Major League Soccer shows that debuted this year whose fates are TBD.2 Like playing poker tournaments, in TV production even the biggest winners lose most of the time.
I know that people have made pilots of poker reality TV shows that have not been picked up. I believe GGPoker planned on selling Game of Gold to a streamer, but had to dump it for free on YouTube because they did not find a buyer. The sports documentary field is oversaturated, and the parlay of getting a show greenlit to series, picked up on a streamer, and watched by a lot of people is very hard to do. Some might note that I am being pessimistic, and I am, but what irks me is when people pitch these ideas as if they’re the only sane person in the room. Asking “Why don’t you just create a hit TV show?” reminds me of people asking me “Why risk $25k in a tournament to win $1k on average? Can’t you just play $2/$5NL at the local casino and win $1000 risk free every single day?”
This suggestion also ignores that many poker movies and shows have been made since Rounders got a second life on cable: Lucky You, The Grand, and Tilt are all 20 years old and failed to capitalize on poker’s faddish peak. In recent years we’ve had Molly’s Game, The Card Counter, Mississippi Grind, Dead Money, and others. I’ve seen the first three and liked them all, but only Molly’s Game made a dent in the culture at all and it did not notably increase poker’s popularity.
It’s hard to make a popular show, and it’s not as simple as asking “Why isn’t there one?”3, but it’s also hard to argue that these shows have significantly increased the popularity of F1 or chess. The pseudonymous Entertainment Strategy Guy has written about the false narrative about Drive to Survive increasing F1’s ratings here and here, while also noting the docuseries is not even watched that much itself. The reason F1 is successful is because they can sell hundreds of thousands of high-priced tickets and every single car is covered in ads from massive corporate sponsors, not because of a Netflix series.
The Queen’s Gambit did seem to increase casual chess play, but chess, like poker mostly benefited from the growth of online chess sites like chess.com and chess becoming popular via streaming and social media as outlined here and here. Of course there are differences between poker and chess– you do not need to risk your own hard-earned bucks to play chess; it’s natural that more people would play free chess than real-money poker. Does all this mean that the poker industry should not be trying to market the game to the non-poker-playing public? Of course not, but it’s frustrating when industry leaders talk about TV shows, while ignoring material things that could improve the poker ecosystem– like lower rake, better game security, and making poker less of a boy’s club.
Chris Moneymaker was a great story and has a great name, but it's clear to me that the initial poker boom happened due to the birth of online poker. I find it absurd when people compare a massive structural change in how and where poker could be played with a popular Netflix series as equal industry catalysts. However, even if it were true that what poker needs is a hit TV show, I think people making this argument are engaging in some magical thinking, which is fine if you’re daydreaming on social media, but not a good use of resources for the poker world.
Thank you for indulging me on that rant. If you’d like more rants like that or top notch poker analysis. Punt of the Day is supported by paid subscribers. It’s $12/USD a month of $100/USD a year. If you are reading this and not a subscriber, please consider subscribing to recieve two free posts a week and four paywalled ones.
Housekeeping
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded
A Rocket Solver sim starting on the flop and turn for POTD #111
A PIO ICM using the exact stack and bet sizes used in POTD #112
An HRC sim to get inequal preflop ranges and a postflop PIO sim for POTD #113
Two BvB PIO sims to show the boards the SB leads on for POTD #114
Several PIO ICM sims digging into the hand I wrote about in POTD #115
This week I also started a private YouTube channel where people can watch my walkthroughs of the custom POTD sims.
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething for POTD #111 where I write about how to pick hands to bluff with when you defend the BB and it checks down to the river.
POTD #111 #onemorething
In some poker hands it can be hard to find hands to bluff. Every draw filled: what are you bluffing with? Sometimes you have to reach for some odd combos or do things like turn made hands or rivered pairs into bluffs. In hands where you defend the BB and it checks down to the river, you have another problem. You have so many combos with sub 5% equity, it’s easy to find hands that have no showdown, but you can’t bluff them all. This is especially true in multiway pots when you need to bluff several people, so what combos do you choose? What you normally want are cards with blockers to strong hands or low cards that don’t interact with your opponent’s range at all, usually off suit twos or threes.
There are not many combos that mix bluffs in our sim today– no showdown hands are usually pure check or pure all-in. The most common bluffs are T8 of spades and hearts, but not diamonds that flopped a backdoor and that shape flips where T7ss and T7hh give up but T7dd pure bluffs (This is a weird quirk that I don't think is worth investigating all that much). Q8 and Q7 with the queen of clubs bluffs, but give up with a low club. T8 and T7 bluff with a club no matter what. Then K2, K4, K7 with any club always bluff and A7 with the ace always bluffs. There are some potential bluff combos that always bet the turn and aren’t available to bluff the river, such as Ac2x, but I am sure it’s a fine combo to bluff if you check the turn with it.
The main takeaway from the breakdown above is in a three way pot you need a reason to bluff from the BB. You want to have a big club or a straight blocker that matches your value and it’s not enough to take a hand like Ts2s and decide I can’t win and I have a two in my hand and bluff with it. You would do that in a heads up pot in part because heads up you could also do something like block bottom pair for value, which would be very optimistic three ways. When finding bluffs it's always important to think of your value range: Are you all-in or fold with range? Then pick no showdown hands with good blockers and try to keep your bluff to value ratio roughly 1:2.
Media
No media appearances for me, but I did start watching the reboot of King of the Hill. I watched the original show as it aired and in syndication and was a big fan and despite a shaky premiere that spends too much time setting up the premise for the reboot. Every other episode I’ve watched thus far has been funny and captured what’s great about the original. When a show gets so much comic mileage out of one character being out of touch and complaining about kids these days, it walks the razor thin line of becoming a show that is just as out of touch as the lead character. The reboot keeps the character and familial dynamics from the original run balanced, while updating it for the modern era. It’s as good as I hoped it could have been and if you liked the original, I highly recommend it.
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Bluesky
Jen Shahade who gave me some guidance on this post told me that “The Queen's Gambit took 15 years to make because its intended star (it was originally supposed to be a feature film) unexpectedly died. Heath Ledger opposite Ellen (now Elliot Page)”. Even hits need a lot of luck
I am also ignoring dozens of sports series not produced by Box to Box films that have have debuted in the streaming era that are neither popular nor critical accliamed.
While you’re here. I will pitch my idea for a poker TV show, if someone steals this idea and makes it a hit, I demand a credit. A Below Deck style reality show about the dealers and staff at Triton/EPT events.