If the goal is to not come last, seems like the better approach would be to put your team in reverse order.

In other words, koon match 1, negs match 2....

Chalk up some easy wins then it shouldn't matter what happens in round 3/4.

Of course in the turbo structure it's not like they'd for sure ship against the 'fish' but may have been the better approach.

I don't think the hands are rigged at all. I also don't think all of the dialogue is scripted either. But, there are instances throughout all the episodes where the players are saying lines that feel not genuine, like they were instructed by showrunners to give them something they felt they could include in the final cut to make it more interesting. But since they're not trained actors those lines of dialogue come across as forced.

I don't agree. I believe you mentioned Arieh saying "I'm the champ" as something that's scripted and IMO that's definitely something that donut would say himself lol.

HOLY SUN RUNNING LUCK BOX FEDOR!!!!!!!!!

I don’t fully understand how the points/coins work, but wasn’t there more for match 4? Therefore you want your best player playing last.

And wow at the end of ep 4, looks like it’s actually going to be like Squid Game. Why else would they film in South Korea?

I'm enjoying it so far, more than I should.

It may be something he'd say, but in that moment on camera it felt like he was instructed to give them something rather than it coming naturally out of him, based on how stiff he was saying it.

format is a mystery but they do know that whoever survives to the winner take all final brings their coins with them and cashes them in for 1bb each

so team dynamics aside, there was a personal benefit to playing the later stages - some of the players were more aware of this than others and even spoke about it in the off camera interviews that they just wanted to go later because they wanted the big blinds

I like it but at the end of the day, when you peel back all the game show drama and structure, it is just poker.

Still a ton of variance, especially in live turbo SNGs, that will decide the winner.

The Koon team basically all ran horribad.

they did run bad, dark times

Back in the day, when I was first getting into serious poker, Jamie Gillis was a regular at my local poker room.

Anyone want to make any guesses about ep5? Are teams randomly picked? Are there captains who pick the teams, possibly the four people from the winning Team Spades?

Why would Kyna have to pick someone? Does each player have to nominate who they think is the weakest player on their team / across all teams?

I have seen the first four episodes now, and think the show is awesome. I have been in the poker world for decades, and so I am not representative of the potential audience, but I think they made a serious effort to make the show appeal to more than just us poker geeks. I can only wonder how well-received it is going to be outside poker circles. How even is the word going to get out?

The sheer number of HU all-ins between dominated and dominating hands is impressive, though, enough to fuel at least a little "ZOMG! RIGGED!" speculation about the producers. Although if it were my thumb on the scales, I would want to keep DNegs, the single most visibly recognizable poker player to the general public, in longer.

I hope the show succeeds, gets lots of outside attention, and brings more people into the world of poker.

I think it is a fun show and allows the audience to get to know the personalities of these players a bit better when they are talking to each other and viewing the games being played. I don't see how this show would appeal to a non poker playing audience.

It's early in the show, but so far the only challenge they have done is play a sit and go. The show is interesting for poker fans but for non-poker fans they still have to watch people talk about elastic ranges, flops that would be good for a check raise bluff, and listen to how Maria Ho owned Yo Viral because he didn't raise pre-flop. This would sound like gibberish to non poker players.

Challenges on other game shows are easier for a main stream audience to follow, because many of them are physical challenges that don't require the audience to have a deep understanding of what is going on. There may be some drama and conflict that appeals to the reality tv audience, but I'm not sure that would be enough to have non-poker fans glued in.

Why is the pot 456k? I noticed in the new Squid game thing the pot is 4.56M.

Google brings some angel stuff meaning to this number but that can't be it, right?

4 episodes in, and I just realized the host is Ali and not Jeff Platt.

Beta male alert

I’ve avoided this thread up to now because I had been behind in watching. But now that I’m caught up with the first 4 episodes, I actually think the show is pretty great.

Obviously the action so far has been just been turbo short-handed SNG, which are very luck based. But the outcome of these isn’t what’s interesting about the show.

The key to the appeal of the show is that all the commentary comes from the teams themselves.

You both see the emotion of the teammates knowing the hole cards in real time, but more importantly, you see the strategy discussion among them from both sides of each hand. And you have a good mix of players on each team, which gives the audience a good perspective on how different play styles and skill levels approach different hands. It’s really a very unique format that I’ve never seen before and adds a ton to the interest in a very basic form of poker.

And the format where each team picked their sequence of players also produced a very good variety of play, where you could see the difference in skill over the course of the four games.

A couple critiques I did have:
- SNG formats that steeply disincentive busting early tend to produce boring and timid poker. I would have at least preferred a structure where 3rd and 4th get the same pay-out, then with a steeper increase for 1st.

- I understand why having an unknown number of points for the last SNG was desireable to avoid collusion, but it really produces an incoherent tournament from a strategy perspective. There should have been a better way to do this (like maybe add a random number of points to a known outcome).

- The shouldn’t allow players to sleep on camera, it just looks disrespectful. If the structure is such that players might need to sleep, they should have an off-camera room for that.

- How is this “Yoh Viral” guys actually a popular streamer? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch him for more than a minute.

Totally pulling this out of my ass, but I have a feeling it's probably cheaper to film in South Korea, GG can probably get more bang for its buck as they have a thriving industry with Korean dramas. Netflix dumps a ton of money on them. With a thriving industry, I'm sure cheaper costs and having no issues filming long hours is perfect for South Korea.

Right now I'm just waiting to find out if there is more to the show then people getting put into teams and playing Sit N Go's. Right now it seems like any other poker show from 2006-2010. Play SNG for points, the person with the most points wins or goes on to another table and gets more chips based on points. Curious to see what the twist is going to be if there is one. Mind you as its one of the best edited poker shows ever. Getting rid of announcers and using the teams commentary is a pretty brilliant spin. They're trying to play up the "game" aspect of it when right now its just people playing turbo SNGs.

The only thing this show confirms, edited poker is the nuts. I wish they'd try a year at the WSOP with no streams and back to edited shows of the events. I know most people would be pissed, but man those shows were way better.

There's a lot of "influencers" in a variety of industries that are popular despite, imo, being completely cringe to watch.

This can either be lots of people with absolutely shitty taste in entertainment, or it can be a lot of them fake it to make it, buying fake subscribers, views and comments to give themselves the appearance of success.

I vlog PLO and a lot of the other PLO vloggers out there have zero personality on-camera, talking in monotones that befuddle me how anyone can tolerate slogging through their content.

what you guys fail to realize is most of us are way too old to understand the desires of a streamer's demographic

the largest single viewing group for streams/vlogs are young children because they have the most time, grew up with this so consider their ipad/phone the default screen instead of a second one and often have direct access to youtube whereas a tv is shared

so yoh doesn't need to appeal to us, so long as the 14 year olds think he's cool (which they probably do) then he's set

14 year olds like to watch some guy play poker in slow motion and take 10 minutes just to make a bet?

Poker hasn’t had a really good show in a very long time and this is a really good show. Poker needed this…However, I don’t understand why they invited that cringy French dude and Joe Dirt.

I’ve also never understood the hype around Jungleman. Guy is a mental case and one of the biggest dorks I’ve ever seen.

The women on the show:
The girls from India & Ukraine are pretty hot. Maria Ho used to be hot before she ruined her face with all the Botox & lip injections.
The fat chick sucks at poker and was kicked out of the Orleans for being a mean, obnoxious drunk.

Bit of a slur against someone who is legitimately autistic (and has talked a lot about this).

The “hype” around Jungleman is his play, not his act. Really very few players can match his success across all forms of poker.

What shows had that format?