thepokerbaffer

I don’t know why I even open the NVG forum on 2+2, it sucks my time away through a dirty hosepipe.

Some people say FB is a waste of time, but some of the threads on NVG make my FB timeline look like a collaborative project between James Joyce and Shakespeare.

One such puddle of soul schlurping shit soup that drew my attention recently was a thread on a PNIA stream from SockDrawer (or somewhere) in the USA featuring a name I hadn’t heard before: #HashtagKing.

I don’t know if that was the name he was given at birth, or whether the # was added later, but despite his obvious attempts at building a public profile, I’d previously never heard of the lad.

Spoiler: The guy’s a cunt, and not the good kind.

He’s not a unique character, I’ve personally encountered ball-bangles like that at several poker games.
Loud, unfunny, rude and thick; only tolerated because they are terrible at poker and donate to all assembled. Other players will absorb the disgusting behaviour as a form of tax on the cash drop.

#HashTagKing would appear to be the high-stakes version of this character, as during the footage he challenged Doug Polk to a HU match for three times his total GPI recorded poker earnings, offering to escrow the entire amount like a complete plum.

How he was going to stump up $1m when he was trying to sell his passport on the stream to cobble together the $5k buyin for the table he was already sitting on is beyond me, maybe he could have a hashtag whip-round on Twitter.
Oh… wait… no, he can’t even do that cos he’s currently suspended from there for being a walloping shit-waffle.

Guys like HashTagHashTagKing do not display the finest side of poker, but long time players from the dark little cardrooms around the world will be familiar with the type.

Are massive cleg-goblins like ##King good characters for poker TV?
Is he a nod back to the big personalities of poker TV days gone by?

Nope.
He’s just a vapid waft of arse gas, spreading stink and stains all over the tables.

The raw stream footage is utterly unwatchable; at least with actual car-crash TV you might get to see some blood and guts or heads rolling about.
The PNIA stream was just a melee of shouting and bullshit offers of heads-up matches that will never happen.

Some decent salvage editing, with particular attention paid to levelling the shit out of everybody’s mic, might produce something watchable; these TV whizzes are experts at the magic they make, although I cannot imagine poker could be presented in a very good light from what they’ll be given to work with.

Wives being denigrated, attempts at selling documents, repetitive, unimaginative insults; there was nothing on that footage except an extended glimpse of poker’s dirtiest underneath.

Car crash reality TV is an upsettingly popular genre, with a long history; let’s look more closely at the boom of reality TV and see if it offers any insight.

The (abridged) truth about reality TV is that whilst it started as early as the 1950s with gentle gameshows and innocent talent contests, its real explosion came due to TV Networks in the early 80s being caught with their pants down when a load of script writers and content creators went on strike.

When another writers’ strike loomed in the early 90s the Network bosses were well prepared and had a fuckton of cheap-to-produce reality TV formats up their sleeves as a super effective middle finger to the disgruntled writers.

Reality TV exploded with the sort of characters that people liked to watch on the box, but would never invite into their own homes; and the reality TV stars that became the most enduring names were inevitably the ones who made the biggest spectacle of themselves on air.

Have PNIA just latched on to a tried and tested formula?
Possibly, but it’s a formula born of desperation, and that makes me nervous, because it’s more proof that poker is so out of popularity that those making their living from broadcasting it are desperate.

I will watch the edited footage when it appears, and I hope it’s a triumph, but I’m not holding my breath.
Poker TV needs to serve one of two purposes:

• Be so accessible and entertaining to people who know nothing about poker that it encourages new players to enter the game and bring their monies.

OR

• Provide such unmissable televisual stimulation to enough of those who already play poker that it brings in big chunks of advert money to support the growth of the poker industry.

I don’t believe any of the footage from that PNIA game will do the former; anyone on the fence about having a pop in a local casino would definitely be put off for fear that they will have to deal with someone like #HashTagCunt.
They probably will, somewhere along the line, but let’s get them to see the beautiful dresscoat of poker before we let them look up the skirt at her unkempt minge.

The stream has obviously garnered a lot of attention from regs and serious recs, but I don’t see how it can be more than a one-hit-wonder.

If every PNIA shows turns into that sort of social warzone, then everyone will get bored of it, and pretty quickly.
The big characters of the past behaved better than #CrapMuncher, even at their very worst and rudest, they never went to the level of insulting anyone’s wife.

To be controversial and polarising without being an absolute gooch-canoe is a tough ask, and those characters are poker TV gold.
I wish PNIA producers the best with their casting endeavours in the future, but am absolutely convinced they hit the post on this one.

All that said, I could be miles off the mark given that the elected leader of the Free World is a reality TV star; perhaps being an obnoxious wank-puffin on budget programming is actually the fastest and surest route to global success for everyone and everything.

On the plus side, we’ll all probably be nuked to shit soon anyway.

Have a great day.