The ABC of Live Poker Reporting
When it comes to sharing crucial advice for those trying to work as a live reporter in the poker industry, it shall perhaps be best to mention one basic principle that nobody is really considering to be pivotal after all.
Knowing players and remembering their names and faces is certainly a key skill that will help greatly along the way. But that’s just a tiny piece of the puzzle needing to be solved and I‘d like to focus on something even more basic.
When approaching many things in our lives, we always talk about the required ABC to get things done and I like to think that this abbreviation applies perfectly to a key skill in poker.
Always
Be
Counting
If you are hired to conduct live reporting from a poker event, one of the most pivotal informations to provide are chip counts of the contestants. The employer counts on you to get job done in a reliable fashion and it takes some practice to assume the stack sizes within a small margin of error.
The counting process itself starts before any cards in the tournament are dealt. This may sound somewhat confusing but it will make sense shortly.
In order to count correctly, it is crucial to know the chips in play and how many of them each of the participants receives at the start. Dealers are preparing their respective table in advance before any of the players have taken a seat and that’s the best time to have a closer look especially when it comes to larger denominations.
The early and mid stages of a tournament are the more tricky ones to get a reliable stack size when one isn‘t used to the counting procedure yet. Later on, it becomes easier because most contestants keep stacks in multiples of tens. That may be off by a chip or two but the estimation will be reliable enough to matter.
When witnessing an ongoing hand, my eyes are constantly roaming around the table to gather the size of the pot, bet sizes and how many chips each of the player involved has behind. If the hand takes quite long, I also try to gather the stacks of other known players at the table as well in order to update them accordingly.
The reasoning behind this „extra work“ is rather simple — to avoid having too much outdated information in the coverage. Knowing the bet sizes on each street helps significantly to speed up the process of determining the stack sizes upon completion of the hand. There is no magic formula how to achieve this kind of automated routine but to keep practicing until you don‘t even need to think about it anymore.
Why do I consider this as a crucial skill after all? In live reporting, the processing speed of accumulating and distributing information directly correlates with how much time you can spend near the tables. Being aware in advance what kind of details you need is a necessity and reliable chip counts are certainly among them.
The faster you are able to submit the content, the more information you can soak up near the tables. Because witnessing the action in person is the most reliable way to know and portray what is happening throughout the tournament.
If you happen to arrive late to a hand, it can become stressful to get a reliable estimate of the stack sizes but there is one more trick up the sleeves. Many players tend to count their own chips after winning or losing a (significant) pot and investing the extra second or two makes lengthy guessing thereafter obsolete.
There are even participants that notice you hovering around the table and glancing at your pile of chips, to which they will provide a usually accurate amount.
The sooner the entire counting procedure becomes part of an automated routine, there will be one less thing to worry about in what can be a very stressful and volatile environment. Being able to process and publish the information in rapid and reliable fashion is a key skill and having accurate stack sizes available without wasting any further time speeds up the productivity a lot.
Of course there are a lot of other things a live reporter in poker has to worry about but that’s perhaps better saved for another blog entry. Otherwise, this piece would rack up thousands of words and be considered TLDR. That very principle also applies to the daily introduction and recap articles as well.
Last but not least, make sure you have a reliable short code for your notes because otherwise you end up with a mess like this:
