Ugh, what a tilting experience to try to follow the event online. We miss you Pokernews!!. At one point that had Max Steinberg @ 115,000,000 chips!! Later Negreanu having lost 90% of his stack - that too was a mis-click. I have no idea why they don't stream it for poker nerds, but surely WSOP.com has not caught up with their skills over the summer.

Absolute train wreck. Consistently.

So Bad! And why no live stream? I am sure it wouldnt hurt the ESPN coverage, us poker nerds are a small percentage of those who watch the ESPN coverage.

By the time the Main Event got to Days 6 an d7, the current WSOP.com "live reporting" page wasn't really all that much different from what PokerNews had to offer. Maybe a little sloppier at times, such as the extra or missing zeroes.

But yeah, I still enjoyed that live coverage we had a few years ago. (Was it ESPN3?) Even if we don't have that, I still think Twitter-based official coverage is the near future. I already said this in the other thread, but what Brian Balsbaugh did for Negreanu (tweeting each action, updated chip count, stack change) was perfect. Once we get to the playdown from 27 to the N9, put a team of WSOP.com reporters out into the field to do what Balsbaugh did, but it would cover all remaining players.

It was awful.

The errors were much deeper that what i noted, and not close to PokerNews IMO. Some peoples stacks weren't updated for hours (basically giving a false story of the tourney), You would see players on the results list, having busted, then you see on the chip counts - they would have chips (which is it?), and then 15 minutes later the hand detail would post. So they werent even coordinating between the info tabs. The writing was also subpar - from my journalism perspective.

This has been hashed and re-hashed over on NVG, but I'll pop in here and concur. At the beginning of the summer, the reporting was truly atrocious (could not have been worse). Names were mixed up. Cards were mixed up. Chip counts were way off (and/or never updated). Hand reports were awful as if written by someone who had never played poker.

As the summer progressed, the quality of the reporting improved (thank god) and by the end approached what we have come to expect from PokerNews. Of course, there were still egregious errors and non-timely reports, not to mention chip count errors that would make a fifth grader blush.

All in all, it was a cost-cutting experiment that went wrong.