We gets exclusive access to the team behind the GUKPT TV show and learn what takes to make great televised poker
It’s final table day at the Grosvenor Casino in Cardiff and inside, nine players are sat nervously in their seats waiting for the first hand to be dealt. Meanwhile, outside in the car park, five people sit inside a large grey truck in front of a bank of TV screens in a scene that resembles something from a NASA mission control unit.
‘Dealing,’ comes the cry from the front row as the cards skid across the felt. Within seconds they have been logged by the computer and stored on one of the screens on the second row. ‘OK, close up on seat four,’ says the director, spotting the dealt hole cards: pocket Jacks.
As the hand plays out, the guys on the second row punch in the data. The cameras flit between the cards on the table and the players’ faces, while a somewhat frantic director calls out the instructions. It’s like watching carefully choreographed chaos. Welcome to life behind the scenes of the country’s biggest poker show – the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour.
BIGGEST AND THE BEST!
For a quick recap, the GUKPT is an eleven-stop £1,000 buy-in poker tour sponsored by Blue Square Poker – the exclusive home of online qualifiers to each leg – that stretches from Newcastle in the north to Portsmouth in the south. Every stop has been a sell-out, and has been attracting UK heavyweights such as Roland de Wolfe, Marc Goodwin and Vicky Coren to come and take their shot at the six-figure prize pools.
But while the money is a big draw, there is little doubt that some of the better-known players have been attracted by the possibility of TV exposure in what is a revolutionary new poker show.
The first of the GUKPT shows is due to air in September on Channel 4. And what is causing all the excitement is that this will be the first time a UK poker tour – rather than a ready- made-for-TV show or one-off tournament – has been broadcast on mainstream television.
When a similar thing happened in the US with the WPT, it caused a poker boom from which we are still feeling the aftershock. If this lives up to the hype, then Britain could finally be about to catch up.
The show’s producer, Cayt Dear, worked on Late Night Poker and is confident the GUKPT can have the same impact as that ground-breaking show from the late 1990s. ‘I can’t think of another UK poker show that is a proper sporting event,’ she says. ‘This matters – and you can feel it.’
COAST-TO-COAST
That said, there is not much of a reason to suspect this is the start of something special when I hook up with the crew in Brighton for the tour’s fifth leg. I find the TV truck parked on a side street just off the seafront and as I step in, it’s either shrunk – or I’ve grown. Breathing out practically makes the truck shake.
The scene is a bit more relaxed than in Cardiff; it’s probably the sea air. But it could be the dominance of Albert Sapiano on the final table, who is cheered on by the team in the truck in the hope of an early finish. It doesn’t turn out that way though, as the atmosphere builds to a climax at heads-up play.
By this stage, the amount of data the TV crew has collected is amazing. All the hands, bet sizes, chip stacks and positions are fed into a piece of software called Pokerscope, which Dear says helps to solve one of the age-old problems of poker TV shows.
‘You have to edit a lot of hands out,’ she says, ‘so, you end up missing the hands where the big stack was pushing everyone around. The only hand you see is where they raise with Kings and the short-stack pushes with [a pair of] 4s. We can fill in those gaps really well using graphics to paint a picture of what is happening. Nobody has done that before.’
As the tournament plays on, I head back out to the stage to watch the action. There is relatively no disruption from the TV crew and the crowd seem genuinely entranced. It’s a mile away from the brutally stage-managed nature of some poker shows.
When Dave Smith finally triumphs in Brighton, it’s clear the victory means the world to him. The final table audience mills around and it feels like the end of a football match as TV interviews are recorded. This is poker as a sport. If this is the future of TV poker in the UK – I like it. I like it a lot.
Poker Player’s magazine app is now totally free to read every month so download it HERE
