Question about the "hole card cam"

[BogeyWan]

I had been wondering about the hole card cam and it came up again recently in a friends blog Up For Poker (Little plug for CJ there)
OK A lot of these guys who play in these tournaments (WPT specifically) and who frequently come up against one another in tourneys...... Do they study the shows?? I mean wouldn't it be a gold mine for the astute pro to have access to that kind of information? Or is it just another, perhaps, negligible piece of the puzzle. I mean these guys play against each other a lot and probably know each other's m-o pretty well already.
Has anyone seen any articles or anything concerning this? Or if you are a pro this affects directly, please feel free to respond. I just thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of some of these guys (or gals) who have played in these and how it affects their play if at all.

[Copernicus]

I would think that a bigger effect than the minimal number of additional hands of knowledge they gain, is the subconscious desire to show off and "make a play" (for the great players) or to play even more tightly and not get caught looking stupid (for the lesser players).

[CrisBrown]

Hi Bogey,

I asked Phil Hellmuth about this, and he said it made no difference to him. He explained that the top players all scout each other regardless, and that the comparatively few hands you see in a WPT or WSOP broadcast don't make all that much difference in their scouting.

I then asked him if the extensive scouting gave an advantage to newer players -- e.g.: Chris Moneymaker, Phil Ivey when he first started, etc. -- and he said that was very much the case. He was able to win the WSOP main event early in his career by playing extremely aggressively and taking lots of chances to build his stack. Of course, once everyone figured that out, they began calling him down, and he had to start playing solid hands.

I think this also provides some answer to a question posed on another forum: has 2003 been the year of the newcomer, and is that good or bad for poker as a sport. I've thought about this at some length.

Consider the PGA Tour, where on a given tourney a handful of surprising players can emerge on the leaderboard, but you'll still see many of the same players week in and week out. But golf is an very different game, in that players are essentially independent actors. Apart from nerves and the occasional need to take risks to catch up or play safe to sit on a lead, one player's performance has no effect on another player's strategy or swing.

In poker, the players are not independent. A substantial part of the game is reading and deception; scouting makes the former easier and the latter more difficult. So I just don't see it as likely that any player can be as dominant, because the more a player excels, the more others on the tournament circuit will notice and scout him/her, and thus diminish his/her advantage.

Yes, over the course of a season, the best players will rise to the top of the money list. But in terms of week-to-week results, I just don't see someone running off six or seven tournament victories in a row....

Cris

[M.B.E.]

Presumably the good players do study the shows, even if they don't admit it.

The real advantage, however, would be getting access to the full, unedited tapes. Then you could break down how someone plays every single hand. After all, what gets televised is just the tip of the iceberg -- if anything it could be detrimental to rely on that stuff as if it were a random sample.

Come to think of it, that will probably be a huge scandal at some point -- it will emerge that the producers of some show are selling, under the table, the unedited tapes for big bucks.