Last month PokerStars aired their new show “The Big Game”, a poker show with a bit of a twist.
Every week 6 players made up of 4-5 well known professionals 0-1 businessmen and 1 loose cannon sit down and play 150 hands against each other, the show is split up into 5 episodes with blinds at $200/$400 with a $100 ante. Players can buyin for between $100k-$500k and $100k is given to the loose cannon, backed by PokerStars they get to keep any profit they make during the show.
I think it’s a pretty fun idea, the loose cannon is obviously the worst player at the table and the professionals and going to be jumping over each other in order to get into a pot with them.
The first show involved Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Laak, Tony G and loose cannon Ernest Wiggins. It was a quite exciting first lineup of players with Tony G constantly needling Phil Hellmuth, Ernist also seemed like quite a character. Doyle typically played his tight and quite game whilst Phil Laak was overly passive, although with Tony G to his left it wasn’t a bad strategy.
Wiggins did quite well in the middle stages and managed to win alot of money in a big hand which put him in profit by around $60k, once he was up money I think he realised the extra $60 was his own money and he went into his shell allowing Negreanu to bluff him off a pot he’d probably have called if his stack was only $90k, that said Negreanu probably knew this and may not have bluffed otherwise. Although the concept is great I do feel it has some flaws, take this for example, the loose cannon doubles up first hand with AA vs KK all in pre flop, he’s going to be up $100k straight away and he’s now playing with $100k of his own money. He’s probably going to nit it up for the rest of the show and make things less interesting. It’s unlikely that’ll happen though, although Ernist did it to a degree in the first show, anyway I won’t put out too many spoilers, well maybe one more in the form of the video clip below, it’s the funniest clip I’ve seen for a long time, Hellmuths face is so funny.
The show can be found here… http://thebiggame.pokerstars.net/ , if you live in the US you can set your dvd’s to record the show on fox 5 nights a week
Here’s a clip from the first show
