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"Hunting is a game like stud poker,
only the stakes are higher."
-- Joel McCrea in The Most Dangerous Game
As of this writing, poker has been a mainstay of reality television for about two years. Joining the number of
poker movies that have been made over the
years, fiction television has now gotten deeper into the action with the debut of ESPN's Las Vegas-set Tilt. (More
Poker TV Shows)
The brainchild of Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the feature film writers of Rounders, Walking Tall and the terrific
Runaway Jury, Tilt focuses on the shady exploits of a crew of lowlifes orbiting around Don "The Matador"
Everest. The Matador is played by Michael Madsen, one of the best, busiest and most watchable actors on the planet. Among
his credits are Reservoir Dogs, Species, Die Another Day, Free Willy, and two of my obscure
favorites: the feature film Kill Me Again, and the cult fave television show, Vengeance Unlimited.
Despite all that, boy did the debut blow chunks. First of all, Madsen has played every variety of hero and lowlife
(especially lowlife heroes) that you can imagine in his career, and he has always been likeable no matter how naughty he
has been. Here, he is dull dull dull. To rise to the level of boring his character would need 10,000 volts shot through him.
The implausibilities, impossibilities and utter stupidities are piled on everywhere you can turn here. One example, the
head of a hotel is an old buddy of, hangs out with, and is involved in the scams of The Matador. This is a bit like Donald
Trump helping one of the parking valets key a bunch of cars. Poker is big business, but almost any individual poker game
offers little opportunity to make any sort of meaningful amount of money, at least an amount that you would risk control
of a casino over. Poker games are small potatoes, the
poker industry is big potatoes, and the
casino industry is mega-mucho potatoes. It's
delusional to think that someone in the door of the big game will care about the kiddie pool.
A key conceptual error of the show though is much more damning. It is so laughably lightweight because in this case:
truth is stranger than fiction! Like the lightweight fantasy world created in Rounders, what we have in Tilt
is a poker show without any of the real comedy, drama, excitement and pathos that can be found in the actual poker world.
It's like someone decided to make a movie of Madonna's life and decided to only show her reading the newspaper in the morning.
Again like Rounders we focus on scumbags, but they are neither realistic scumbags, nor even close to the scummiest
of the poker world. These guys are like Mary Poppins compared to poker scumbags. They do absurd nonsense. They think in
idiotically braindead terms (no less that FIVE characters seem motivated only by revenge without the slightest care about the
money, wealth and power swirling around them). A drama needs drama for heaven's sake. A poker-based TV show needs poker energy
and motivations, not fantasies more appropriate for a schoolyard where a pack of cigarettes was the most valuable thing at stake.
Of course, these comments are based on only one airing, so perhaps future episodes won't be so excruciatingly lightweight,
but then again, it appears likely there won't be many future episodes...
From a poker strategy point of view though, the show should develop even more new players who are led to believe trivial, unimportant
and utterly worthless nonsense about this business. This will of course inevitably lead to them making donations to people who make
an effort to understand the good, bad, complicated and genuinely important aspects of living a life in the poker world.
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