In this episode of Chats with Tats, pro player Neil Channing shares his new venture—a new format of televised poker—with CalvinAyre.com’s Tatjana Pasalic.
Can you last 100 minutes playing poker?
There is a new format for televised poker from Sky Poker TV, called The 100 Challenge, in which a gang—led by poker pro Neil Channing—track the best cash players by challenging them to turn £100 into as much as they can in 100 minutes.
“We get various guests on each week and they have 100 minutes to turn £100 into as much as they can playing small, but they play live on the TV while they chat to the presenters,” Channing told CalvinAyre.com. “There’s two guys playing on iPads and there’s two people interviewing. It’s kind of, they’re under pressure because the people that they’re playing are just random people on the Internet.”
Under the challenge rules, guests can only sit at one Mastercash table that has 25p to 50p blinds and the two challengers can’t sit at the same table. Currently, James Akenhead leads the pack with the most profit.
“[The players] now they think, ‘Oh I can bluff a lot because these people won’t want to go broke in the first five minutes of the challenge.’ I think it makes, I don’t know, I think it’s different,” Channing said.
Televised poker has been around for a while, but Channing said it’s time to come up with something fresh.
“I like what David Tuchman’s doing. I think the livestreaming is very good. I like the way that they get his co-commentators each time is somebody that’s expert in that particular game,” he explained. “The ESPN coverage, on the one hand, I think, is excellent but on the other hand, it hasn’t changed much over the years, has it? Because it is hard to come up with new ways to make it interesting.”
A lot of people believe that super high rollers might be the answer to sportifying poker, because viewers can sort of pick their favorites and least favorites. Channing, however, is not a big fan of seeing high rollers on television.
“I totally get that point, but I also think a lot of what’s interesting about watching as a TV viewer is that you have to be able to say I could imagine myself being there. I think it’s hard for an average guy to imagine themselves in a 100K buy-in tournament or 25K buy-in. It’s unreachable for most people, so in the thing that we’re doing you know, it’s a £100 and you could actually kind of drive the car yourself,” Channing said. “I’m not a big fan of the high rollers, actually.”
