Revisiting Lisandro v Ivey (Re: ESPN making up hole cards)

[Kevmath]

From Steve Rosenbloom's mailbag column at espn.com:

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From Darren of Chicago: "Steve, great poker column. I wanted to get your thoughts on the current climate of distrust concerning ESPN poker broadcasts. There have been numerous and substantiated claims that the production teams have manufactured drama by creative editing and, at times, flat-out guessing the hole cards. It's frustrating that the game's integrity is not being maintained by the standard bearer of progressive sports television, ESPN.''

Darren, I know there has been a lot of discussion on poker sites about this, especially ESPN's World Series of Poker circuit event involving Phil Ivey's and Jeffrey Lissandro's hands.

So, I sent your entire e-mail to ESPN and received this response from Keri Potts, the associate manager of communications for ESPN and ABC Sports: "We log every hand played and record every hand played at our table. All our shows are edited down to show the main 12-15 hands. We cannot possibly air 12 hours of unedited footage from an event's final table. But we do not manipulate the result."

And I received this response from Bob Chesterman, head honcho for ESPN's original entertainment broadcasts: "We do not reshoot any hole cards. The cards in question were not clear. In some cases, when we can trust the player, we ask them what they had afterwards.'' The first year we did reshoot some hole cards because we had cameras that went down. We have learned from our mistakes and do not do this anymore"

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Other good questions in the mailbag can be found over here.