POKER HAND #83

TILT: I watched the long-awaited new ESPN poker drama, "Tilt" tonight. After viewing the preview special and rewatching "Rounders" recently, I had high hopes for the show. Not based on "Rounders," because that movie is pretty dumb. I hate all these dumb scenes where the guy is like "raise" and the other guy is like "re-raise."

But in the preview special, one of the creators was like, "Now that everybody knows more about poker, we can do a lot more." OK, I thought, that's what this would be about.

Instead a mind-bafflingly bad show. As a reader of lots of stories about poker, I can think of tons of ones that interest me a lot more than this. Stories that interest me a lot more, and don't cast a bad light on the game. This movie made high-stakes poker look like the movie "Casino." It paints a horrifying image of a corrupt high stakes gambler played by Michael Madsen.

If you know a lot about some of the great players in poker, and the amazing experiences they went through, it's hard to be interested in these kinds of unrealistic plot lines.

If I were debuting a poker show, I would build it around a mentor and a young gun. Before the show ended, there's no way I could exhaust the number of great poker stories just told by Doyle Brunson. Then you have a guy like Stu Ungar, who lived a far more entertaining life than any of the people here. His story would be tons better than the stale dialogue and crappy plotlines exhibited here.

Then the most obvious of plotlines is thrown right in your face -- Mike Matusow, a major tournament player busted by the cops for helping an undercover cop buy cocaine. How do you screw that one up?

One of my favorite players, Daniel Negreanu, has an interesting life story and certainly lives a fascinating life. It's just amazing to me that you have this weird people in the poker world and the master poker player you present in the show is just a gangster version of another Madsen character from a Tarantino movie.

Like the co-creator said, people know a lot more about poker. I would have shown the hole cards of characters onscreen and cooked up really dramatic situations. You can't follow along a hand if all that the action is concerned with is whether a guy is bluffing or not.

At least they are building up to a World Championships-like situation. With that said, I don't see how this is going to get any better. Huge thumbs down for "Tilt."