Hey guys,

Pokerstars aired their new show this week in the form of the ‘Big Game’, and I’ve been asked to review the show as regularly as I can.

Here’s the premise: Each week of five shows is taken from 150 hands that were played in a single day, hands of 6-max cash NL hold'em. The game is $200/$400 with antes, Pot Limit preflop and No Limit post flop, with a buy-in range of $100,000 - $500,000. The six seats at the table are taken by 4 or 5 famous professionals, 0 or 1 businessmen who have poker experience, and 1 'Loose Cannon' who is not accustomed to playing for these stakes. The 'Loose Cannon' is backed by PokerStars for their $100,000 buy-in. They get to keep only any profit they might have at the end of the day, but if they win they do have the option to come back and play again.


I think it’s a good concept, and definitely adds something different to the current poker shows around. Everyone involved seems to be pretty happy with it. It’s obviously crazy +ev for the professionals, and it should lend some accessibility to a large percentage of the audience who might otherwise be disinterested in a high stakes cash game.

I’m also a long-time fan of the Two Jacks in the Hole podcast, so it’s cool to have Joe Stapleton as one of the two hosts (Chris Rose being the other). I enjoyed Stapes getting in a plug after a hand involving JJ saying “Two Jacks in the Hole are good”.

This week’s show involved Daniel Negreanu, Phil Laak, Tony G, Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth and a ‘loose cannon’ Ernest Wiggins. Everyone played pretty much how you would expect them to play if you’ve seen them on previous tv shows, and I think in this line up in this format Daniel actually has a pretty significant edge. Obviously it's not the kind of line up most online guys are going to enjoy watching the most, but I'm told that in the coming weeks guys like Ansky/Ike are going to be on so that should change the dynamic a lot (for the better).

Another thing I think would improve the show is a way to incentivize the loose cannon for playing when ahead. Once this week’s cannon was up 60K he basically stopped playing for the last ~50 hands, and rightfully so. At that point if he puts in 10K it’s 10K of his own money, which is going to be a very meaningful amount for anyone coming on the show. I’m not quite sure how to best go about addressing it, but possibly something like this; you introduce an inflection point of around 150-250K profit that if reached your winnings are doubled. I think this could be enough to convince our regular Joe to risk 50K-100K.

I don’t know if anyone watched the Penn Jillette hosted game show ‘Identity’, but that was set up such that once you got to the last choice you had to risk 250K of locked down money to go for 500K. I assumed that there would never be anyone game enough to go for it, and I was really surprised to be wrong a couple of times. The hope would be that the same principle would apply here (presumably more so since they will be more likely to be gamblers), and I think it would make for a more exciting show. The question is just whether or not the increased excitement is worth the extra prize money it costs to implement.

So yeah, go watch the show. You guys in the USA can set your DVRs/Tivos to record it 5 nights a week on FOX, and everyone else can go to the website http://thebiggame.pokerstars.net/ where the shows get put up pretty quickly.

I’ll leave you with the most popular clip of this week's show:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID8rap6LFVo

Till next time.