There are nine Franciscan monks on an island somewhere saying, ‘OK, 100 bucks for the buy-in,’” joked Norman Chad, ESPN’s witty and irreverent poker analyst.
“I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying this, but I actually hope Hold ‘Em loosens its grip on poker nation and does not take over society. There are other things to do and other games to play. It cannot go on like this, can it?”
This much is clear: There’s no end in sight. At least not with televised poker.
The Travel Channel’s telecasts of the World Poker Tour double the ratings of its second-most popular show, according to the New York Times.
Fox Sports Net aired a three-hour live tournament Wednesday from the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas.
CBS recently announced it would carry a poker tournament at 2 p.m. on Christmas Day.
And the network that is most responsible for the nation’s poker boom, ESPN, will air 32 hours of coverage of the 2005 World Series of Poker. ESPN will show two one-hour episodes every Tuesday night from July 19 to Nov. 15, when the Main Event champion is crowned.
The 50 percent increase in ESPN’s coverage mirrors the 42 percent ratings boost from the 2003 WSOP to the 2004 edition.
Chad, who teams with the no-nonsense Lon McEachern, deserves some credit for that rise.
His best lines are unforgettable. When Dutch Boyd took an eternity before deciding whether to call a big bet from Chris Moneymaker, Chad remarked, “If he looks at him any longer, he’s going to have to ask him to dinner.”
After 2004 runner-up David Williams hugged his mom, Chad deadpanned, “To be honest with you, Lon, when you travel with your mother, it usually doesn't intimidate the other players.”
When Mike “The Mouth” Matusow threw a fit after a losing hand, Chad declared, “I wish I wasn’t alive to hear this.”
Chad, whose columns have appeared in the Washington Post and Sports Illustrated, had been doing work for ESPN when a producer asked him in 2003 if he ever had considered poker commentary.
“I said, ‘Gee, it's every little boy’s dream,’” Chad recalled. “I called a friend and he said, ‘You have no career, why wouldn’t you do this?’”
Chad has been in Las Vegas since the earliest days of the 2005 WSOP, a 45-day series of tournaments.
Once an event is completed, ESPN edits out the nondescript hands. Then Chad and McEachern add commentary, stepping around the “natural sound” from the miked players.
“A typical final table takes 8-10 hours,” Chad said. “We’re going to show 45 minutes of it. Of the 150-200 hands that are played, we show 15 of them.”
By the Nov. 15 airdate of the main event’s final table, every serious poker fan will know the winner. And that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
“Evolution hasn’t reached the point,” Chad said, “where there’s a demand to have it live.”
Give it time.
