Poker After Dark (or: why silence is golden)
High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker. All you ever hear (on this blog, at least) is High Stakes Poker. So I thought I should pay some credit to the only other really good poker show on the planet. BBC2’s Food Poker!
Alright, no. Let us instead celebrate NBC’s Poker After Dark (as Food Poker’s rubbish, and inexplicably not on Pokertube). PAD’s format is pretty simple, and there’s no cooking involved; six players buy-in for $20k and play a winner-takes-all SNG. This is shown in five programmes every weeknight. And why is it great?
It’s great because of Oliver “Ali” Nejad, the king of poker commentary. Shhh! Can you hear him?
…
No. Because Nejad isn’t saying anything. He’s waiting until he sees something worth commentating on. He’s not telling you what the players at the table are saying, because he knows that if he keeps his mouth shut, you’ll be able to hear them for yourself. He’s not riffing his way through one of his favourite tortured poker analogies for the thousandth time. He’s certainly not trying to make you laugh. And he’s not a celebrity DJ who’s stumbled into the studio by accident and is now attempting to pass his cluelessness off as an endearing character flaw. He’s Oliver Nejad, and he’s going to keep his mouth shut until he has something worth saying. He’s a legend, is what I’m saying.
Nejad’s so good, it doesn’t even matter that he has a fairly annoying voice. You rarely hear it. I sometimes get the impression that he’s busy doing something else at the same time; reading a really good book, perhaps, or playing poker online. Every now and then, he looks up and says “Doyle’s raised it up with an inside straight draw”, and he’s done for another five minutes.
Meanwhile, the players natter away, and the action unfolds at it’s own pace. The show’s five-episodes-a-week format provides plenty of room for the action to develop, and although it’s not as sedentary as High Stakes Poker (where three hands can take up an entire episode), the end product is… well, soothing. Poker happens, and Nejad lets it.
I’m a fan, basically.
“And he’s not a celebrity DJ who’s stumbled into the studio by accident and is now attempting to pass his cluelessness off as an endearing character flaw. “
Ah, Colin “No-Nothing Bozo The Non-Wonder Dog” Murray. Never saw a show he couldn’t wreck.
Thanks for the link, it’s a show that had passed me by completely.
Rodafowa
January 22, 2008 at 11:45 pm
He’s managed to totally ruin Real Football, American Pretend Football, and Telly Poker for me. I simply cannot understand why people keep employing him to cock up their shows.
“He’s called all-in”. NO HE FUCKING HASN’T, YOU BERK.
dermoth
January 24, 2008 at 1:57 pm
It was a particularly cruel joke having him sit opposite Mike Carlson, who’s roughly the best pundit on British TV, for the Helmetball. But at least there you only had to listen to his trademark dimiwitted facile nasal blathering during breaks in play. I’m trying to think of a game and commentator less suited than Murray and poker, and all I can come up with is the World Chess Championship with Joe Pasquale.
Rodafowa
February 1, 2008 at 11:33 am
njad is the single most annoying person on tv. letting him play on the show was the single worse decission the producers could have made. i really hate this guy and his pretentious dorky (but not in the good way) stuck up dweebishness die!
wonderbread
May 22, 2008 at 6:57 am