Leeanne Tweeden is hostess with the mostess on NBC's Poker After Dark(credit: NBC sports on MSN)
One of the more interesting poker TV shows to come around in recent year’s is the NBC show Poker After Dark. Watching the show can be entertaining for poker fans, but also quite educational.
Most poker TV shows looked to the World Poker Tour for how to present the games to the viewing public; when the WPT came about there was nothing quite like it, and the WPT went a long way towards promoting the poker boom. The problem some find with these shows, however, is the highly contrived, edited nature of how poker is presented; Poker After Dark changes all that.
On PAD six poker pros buy in to a winner take all $120k no limit Texas hold’em tournament. The game is filmed and then broken up into five “nights” of episodes, during which time there is very little they don’t show.
Just about every hand is shown, including the very boring, very normal hands where one person raises and the rest fold, or the blind battle it out and the first to bet wins the hand. These are real poker hands that occur for the majority of a poker tournament, and the kinds of hands one rarely sees on the World Poker Tour. Also the action is followed from the very low blinds all the way to the end.
Why, you may ask, would you want to watch boring poker hands? First, while the action may be boring, the conversation and interaction of the pros rarely are, so PAD has that going for it. Second, because these are real hands, played by real pros, and they provide examples of how you should play in similar situations. The WPT only shows a player how to play at a very high level, and they only show part of the picture. Poker After Dark shows the entire picture, which provides for a very unique learning experience.
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