When I think poker and television I think beef and Brussels sprouts, when I should be thinking beef and mustard. The two just don’t seem to get on.
I’m talking about all forms of square box entertainment; live streaming, television and even cinema – boring, boring, boring.
The news that the poker books Alligator Blood and Check-Raising the Devil are to be made into films worries me. I loved both, but I have no faith that Hollywood will bring those pages to life with the same fairy dust that the authors sprinkled onto the pages.
You can blame the woeful, and turgid, Runner Runner, for my current way of thinking, but I have received a spark of ingenuity thanks to Jason Kirk and his post on How to Make the Perfect Poker Movie that I saw on Titan Poker recently.
Instead of trying to make the perfect movie, why not focus on the strengths that a poker game possesses and work on ‘How to Make the Perfect Poker Sitcom’?
Characters
It’s the characters that create the story.
The reason that poker is so boring to watch on television is because the characters have no life. The world of cinema hands you 180-minutes to get under skin of the cast, and you wonder why you aren’t feeling that connection?
We need to develop a relationship with what we see. We need characters that are riddled with life’s little faults, frailties and fuck-ups. We need to see pieces of us in them. When we run our finger along their shadow we want to feel rough edges, and perhaps even draw some blood.
What better way to fall in love with characterisation than to stick nine of them in a room and listen to them talk about life?
Confined Spaces
Think about all the great sitcoms and what do most of them have in common? A confined space.
When you only give enough people a certain amount of air from which to breath then you can see them come to life. The fight to be noticed starts right there and then.
The Royle Family succeeded because most of the scenes took place in the living room. The ridicule, the embarrassment – we felt it because we were in the room right next to him.
Mrs Browns Boys, The Office, Derek, Friends and Cheers are just a few of the classics that shoot most of their action in the confines of four walls. What better setting than a poker table.
It’s a sitcom wet dream.
Catchphrases
The best catchphrases all come from the world of the Sitcom.
“How YOU doin?” – Joey Tribbiani in Friends.
“You plonker.” – Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses.
“My arse.” – Jim Royle in The Royle Family.
I could go on and on.
So why are these so memorable?
It’s because we relate to those words because we relate to character. We can actually imagine ourselves saying them. We understand the arrangement, the accent, and the acoustics. We get it.
Stick nine people around a poker table and listen to what falls out of their mouths. The dialogue never goes stale, but there is no thesaurus, no dictionary – just the same old phrases and sentences all delivered in a slightly different way.
Then you get some gems.
The pearls of wisdom.
The cracker-uppers.
There is no setting like it.
Poker is the epitome of life, and our connection with life is why we love our sitcoms. This is why there are so many trilogies in the movies these days, and why everyone loves a box set like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones.
We need time to build our love for someone, to cry for someone, or to laugh with someone.
This is why a single movie finds it so difficult to bring a poker book; bad beat story, or idea to life. It doesn’t have time, and there is death everywhere. Lying on the cutting room floor when it should be glued back together and given new life.
Life that would leap out at you if it were set in the confines of a small room, filled to the brim with gnarly characters, and with the most wonderful melodies spewing out of their common little mouths.