Televised poker offers a rich mix of tension, some wildly contrasting personality types and no shortage of drama. Sometimes the drama is all about the cards. At others it’s just one of those things that can happen when you get the right mix of personalities competing in front of the cameras. Everybody’s tense, everybody’s trying to play their opponents as well as the cards and everybody can get it wrong occasionally. Here are four of our favourite televised poker moments from over the years:
Everybody’s favourite. Tony Guoga’s professional frustration with the way Russian pro Ralph Perry threw it all away in the Intercontinental Poker Championship was maybe a step too far. Talk of reigniting the cold war was in the cards after Tony G’s furious 60 second diatribe at the Russian for going all in with King Jack and losing to a pair of 2s. Guoga’s famous “This is not something for someone to learn from!” and “Go on Russian, get out!” still tickles a lot of boxes.

Phil Ivey is pretty cool, and he is widely regarded as one of the best poker players to have ever lived. A master of all poker games from Hold’em to Stud to Badugi, he is well known for his cool demeanor at the tables. Even when he loses, he manages to somehow come out of the scene looking smarter than the opposition.
Gavin Smith’s head to head with the great man on the Full Tilt sponsored show Poker After Dark is a great illustration of how Ivey keeps his focus – this time in the face of a bumbling stream of half-baked back chat. Smith’s repeated calls for cocktails didn’t stop him winning, but not before he had Ivey rolling his eyes and no doubt pinching himself to check that what he was seeing was real. Some people still insist he was faking to put Ivey off his stride. He was seriously funny though!

Ivey’s understated reactions are part of what make him so great to watch. There is the famous hand where he’s waiting on Chris Ferguson to do something – anything – for about three minutes before the man they call Jesus simply folds with an eight and an ace and a 0% chance of making anything from the hand. All the signs are that Ferguson just didn’t realise that he had cards in front of him. Could he have been asleep? That’s funny enough, but Ivey’s jaw-dropped reaction is the perfect foil!

Not everyone is quite so understated. In fact Daniel Negreanu’s reaction to seeing Mike “the Mouth” Matusow bluffed out of a 120,000 chip pot with just a pair of threes by Mike Sexton was way over the top. Having backed out of the hand early, Negreanu was no more than in interested spectator, so when he leapt out of his seat to mime an extravagant spanking whilst hooting, “You just got pwned real bad there! Dush, dush dush. Man that was dirty! Dush dush dush,” it was a surprise on any number of counts. Negreanu’s creative contribution to the English language will last a lot longer than his chips did that night!

Needless to say there are plenty more gems out there – and no doubt a few more will be appearing on Youtube shortly. It is, as they say, all part of the fun.

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