Static Zombie

Yeah, the winner is getting a lot of press. You want to avoid several on-line gambling sites, any place that has entertainment based press releases (a la TVSpy.com), any on-line blogs for people who were playing or activley caring, etc.

I'm thinking, with this drastic rise in popularity, that avoiding the news might be a very difficult thing to do, but I applaud your effort!

I understand the desire, but it seems impractical. Like trying not to learn who won the baseball World Series, for several months.

I read Yahoo Entertainment news and there's nothing there on the topic, and I haven't seen anything on the other sites I visit. It should have been fairly easy to avoid. I certainly wasn't expecting a spoiler in the headlines of boardgames.about.com.

It's unfortunate that your goal (not wanting to know) and Erik's goal (reporting some important gaming news) clashed. But that's all it is. Unfortunate. There's no shame on Erik.

When is the WSOP going to air?

It would have been just as easy to post an item with the headline "World Series of Poker Results". Anyone wanting to know more could click through; anyone wanting to avoid spoilers could choose not to click through. Simple.

The real issue is - why can't we watch these things live? Or at least immediately after the tourney is finished. Why do we have to wait six months? They manage to churn coverage out with other sports. Even with some chess matches, for crying out loud.

Well, they can't really air it live because it would take up about twelve hours of programming every day, and you'd have to be able to cut to different cameras, etc. Seeing a bunch of fat guys fold is what the tournament is all about, at least until the later stages...

The editing that goes into it is pretty intense - it does display a 'skewed' perception of the game of poker, but it highlights the key hands and the ebb and flow of the 'larger picture'. Thank god for that. Watching it live can be really boring. Pokerpages.com has some live footage that is ok, but you've got to be hardcore to enjoy it I think.

It's difficult in today's internet to avoid, even for a little while, spoiling events that you may not have seen live (say, because you have Tivo and had something better to do). I had to perform elaborate information-dodging rituals to not hear the Survivor winner for the 3 hours it took to get home after the finale aired, and I've failed in previous, similar attempts. The common media assumption seems to be that those who care about the results watched live -- that assumption is no longer valid.

There's no way I could avoid it with all of the playing online that I'm doing, but it would be cool to see a couple of hours of programming a couple of days after it was recorded. We should be getting a lot of WSOP TV coverage later this month on ESPN. What's worse is that I know all of the winners of the WPT tourneys and we've only seen half of them.

Following up to Geoff's comment, there was a British TV comedy in the 1970s ("The Likely Lads") which has only one episode that anyone remembers, not least because it was remade, moderately spectacularly badly, a year or two back.

It concerns two characters' efforts not to find out the results of the day's biggest football match before the highlights are shown on TV that evening and a bet with a friend (ah, that sitcom staple...) as to whether they can achieve this or not.

In both versions of the episode, the game turns out to have been postponed due to rain. SPOILER! Oh.

The more that TiVo succeeds, the more likely that people will become more careful about avoiding spoiling. Tell Erik how you feel and give him your suggestions. And tell him to get TiVo!