Flopped the Nuts

In a curious development, the Poker Superstars Invitational, the bizarrely structured and infinitely long big-name-only poker tourney that has been a mainstay on Fox Sports for a while now, popped up on NBC this afternoon opposite the NFL draft.

Despite the network weirdness, it was a decent show, with madman Gus Hansen taking out the entire field. And I mean that, too: Gus Hansen personally defeated each of the other poker wizards seated at the table. Gus’ super-aggressive play really seems to get under the skin of players like the perineally grumpy Howard Lederer and Phil Ivey, who is generally pretty aggro himself, but tends to clam up against Hansen. The real problem this time was that Gus actually caught a lot of real cards instead of his usual rags. That meant that when the other players thought they’d finally catch him in an act of chicanery, he’d have good enough cards (to him) to just call their all-in bet. Then, even when he was beaten pre-flop, he’d end up beating them by catching something. Nobody wanted to go up against Gus, but everyone ended up having to do just that.

Also, Chip Reese, one of my personal faves, seems doomed to never do well on television.

Furthermore, on the major network tip, there were tons of advertisements for NBC’s upcoming National Heads-Up Poker Championship tourney, which appears to be taking “bizarrely structured” to a whole new level.

It looks like it’s going to be a series of single elimination heads up matches, whittling down a 64 player pool of mostly recognizable players to a final head to head battle. This strikes me as, um, dumb, but I guess it might make fun TV. My thing is, I really like to study positional play at a full table, so this thing has less appeal than most poker broadcasts. I’ll no doubt end up watching it when it airs next month, though. I’ll be hoping for Chip to break his TV curse. If not Mr. Reese, I’d like to see the recently resurrected Huck Seed win something on television, as well.