WPT Hollywood Home Game
The World Poker Tour just had their version of Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Challenge (CPC) called “WPT Hollywood Home Game”. The players consisted of: Jack Black, Drew Carey, Steve Harris, Aisha Tyler, Fred Savage and Mimi Rogers. Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten were the commentators and Evelyn Ng “dealt” (they actually had the players rotate the deal). In my opinion, this was way better than CPC. First off, the actors actually knew how to play the game which is a huge improvement over CPC where half the people (or maybe all of them on the West Wing episode) didn’t even know the basics.
The graphics are nicer this year. I’m assuming this will be the style of the graphics that they will be using for the upcoming season of the WPT. The one thing that I wish they did was to put the percentages of who is ahead up all the time. They will periodically flash them over ther graphics of what pocket cards the player has, but I would still like to have them up all the time.
They also gave each player a “red card” that allowed them to call in the pros to ask advice. They had Daniel Negreanu and Jennifer Harmon as the pros. They were called in a couple of times and the players took their advice every time and (IIRC) they won every time. I think this was a pretty good idea for this type of game, Daniel and Jennifer got excited and were rooting for their advice to play out. It was kind of fun.
I’m not sure if the WPT is planning on more of these, but if they do, they’ll blow away the CPC, at least if they keep getting the same caliber of players. Overall I thought it was pretty entertaining, much, much better than CPC, not that it’d be that difficult to bet that.