For the past two months, my colleagues here in Casino City have covered the Poker 2015 main event of the World Series extensively in stadiums in Las Vegas and in ESPN coverage. I made copies of their coverage to make sure every sentence is a sentence and that "Butteroni" is spelled correctly. I'm from New Jersey. I'm familiar with the Italian surname.

But one thing bothered me. Poker is actually their own accent, and I'm not that fluent in it. I find myself playing Catan's Settler or Gloom's Settler more than Texas Holdham, and my favorite game on the Mohegan line is "How much chicken and waffle can I have in a hash house go?" 온라인카지노

The beginning is the beginning of the end?

Previous episodes were a bit disorientating for me, as episode one begins on day four, when more than 85% of the stadium has already been eliminated. This is being announced, but I didn't really have a sense of it. With 1,000 players remaining, it was hard to understand that the runaway players in the first few episodes were actually very good players who performed well in the contest, because there was still a big, crowded atmosphere to go around on the TV screen for a few hours. And while many players seem to be well known in poker, they're unfamiliar to me, so it was easy for me to get lost among all the short, separate character profiles and mini-story lines. (Actually, I think I might have accidentally skipped episode three, as there wasn't a story line strong enough to notice if I missed something at the time.)

But anyway, I was happy to keep watching. This is because a lot of the people on display here are really stupid and very interesting. Also, when your sense of how far we are in a tournament gets shot, it makes it even more fun for Phil Helmut to be eliminated at the end of episode two. This is because he likes to get a lot of FaceTime during the first two episodes and talk about how cool he is.

television poker and your eighth grade English class

But no matter how funny characters poker players are, there is no story if they have nothing to do. When I told other non-poker people what I was seeing, they all wanted to know: Isn't it boring to watch other people play cards for hours? There is no fun running to jump into others like soccer. How does this work as an audience sport?

The answer is ridiculously simple. Poker is an incomplete game of information for players. Each player can only see his or her hole card. Obviously, there will be no games otherwise. But because the audience can see everyone's hole card, we have more information than the people who play the game on the screen. In literature, it is called "dramatic irony," and audiences love it. It is no less effective here.