I don’t really know what to think of this. At first glance, it really kind of bums me out.

Heres the deal. I read Paul Phillips blog. Good times, I highly suggest it. Anyway, Paul Phillips is a professional poker player. He’s also a little out there. That usually makes for good reading. Well Paul has been saying for a while that ESPN actually fabricates drama during the hands by showing hole cards that are incorrect. Looking at some of the hands in question, and some of the video proof he has, it’s hard to argue with it. It’s also easy to dismiss it, seeing that Paul can be sort of a conspiracy theorist.

There was a hand, in one of this years WSOP circuit event broadcasts, that was played out in a way that had a lot of people saying “there is no way that happened”. It was between Phil Ivey and Jeff Lisandro. Lisandro had Pocket 10’s, and Ivey had Pocket 9’s. The flop was 444 and Lisandro bet, Ivey called. Turn card was a 5, Lisandro bets, Ivey moves all in over the top, and Lisandro folds. Now, Lisandro was chip leader and had Ivey covered by a pretty good amount. He had also put a bunch of money in the pot already. With the overpair, it’s hard to see how he could lay this down. But when they showed his hole cards, you couldn’t see both of them. You could only see one card, the 10 of spades.

The day after the broadcast Paul posted on his site that he was sure that ESPN had fabricated the second 10, and there was no way Lisandro held it. Reading his reasoning, it makes sense. So there has been a bunch of talk about it on all the poker forums. Well some savvy reader from 2+2 sent an email to ESPN about it.

Here is the post from 2+2:

From Steve Rosenbloom’s mailbag column at espn.com:

Quote:
From Darren of Chicago: “Steve, great poker column. I wanted to get your thoughts on the current climate of distrust concerning ESPN poker broadcasts. There have been numerous and substantiated claims that the production teams have manufactured drama by creative editing and, at times, flat-out guessing the hole cards. It’s frustrating that the game’s integrity is not being maintained by the standard bearer of progressive sports television, ESPN.”

Darren, I know there has been a lot of discussion on poker sites about this, especially ESPN’s World Series of Poker circuit event involving Phil Ivey’s and Jeffrey Lissandro’s hands.

So, I sent your entire e-mail to ESPN and received this response from Keri Potts, the associate manager of communications for ESPN and ABC Sports: “We log every hand played and record every hand played at our table. All our shows are edited down to show the main 12-15 hands. We cannot possibly air 12 hours of unedited footage from an event’s final table. But we do not manipulate the result.”

And I received this response from Bob Chesterman, head honcho for ESPN’s original entertainment broadcasts: “We do not reshoot any hole cards. The cards in question were not clear. In some cases, when we can trust the player, we ask them what they had afterwards.” The first year we did reshoot some hole cards because we had cameras that went down. We have learned from our mistakes and do not do this anymore”

“when we can trust the player”

Let me let you all in on a little inside tip. You can never trust the player. While at the table, I lie about hands all the time. Even when it’s not that important at the time. We do it to give the perception of how we want everyone to think we are playing. Tight, loose, whatever. The fact remains that you can not trust what a player says. ESPN is not only trusting what they say, they are building drama and broadcasting it!

Dutch Boyd said that after (the 04 WSOP, I beleive) he recieved a phone call from ESPN. They asked him “hey on this hand against this guy, what did you have?” He replied with “dude, I have no idea”. They countered with “the board was blah, blah, Queen” to which Dutch said, “I don’t know, say I had two Q’s”. ESPN said thanks, and hung up.

I look forward to the new WSOP broadcasts every week. This news, for me at least, is a HUGE buzz kill.