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#264 – London Journal #25 – Last Hand at the Empire, Part III – Shadow Boxing

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By 11:15 AM, we are in the Shadow Bar, whether the Main Event will conclude. Rupert, the TV producer, immediately delivers two pieces of good news. First, he has spoken with the consultant about U.K. product placement rules. Once Betfair places its logos on the 4 players, it won’t have to remove them if non-Betfair players are eliminated, even if Betfair has more than half the remaining players. Second, the taped interviews with the final-table players are proceeding on schedule.

I follow Ty to the Betfair players lounge, where he again sees Bex along with two other Betfair representatives. Even though the players lounge is nearly empty and it’s more than 2 1/2 hours to the final table, the place has the vibe of the championship team’s locker room. When he tells them the good news about the logo-rule interpretation, it’s even better.

In the Flame Bar outside the players lounge – so named because of the barbecue-type open flame at one end – Stewart unsheathes the contents of the mystery bag: a large red velvet pillow. He doesn’t have to tell me its significance. The ads around town proclaim, “The King of Europe will be crowd at Leicester Square.” They picture the Championship Bracelet on a velvet pillow. This is the pillow.

At least it is for today.

“Where did you get it from?” I ask.

Ty reads my blog sometimes, so I think he knows my predilection for misdemeanor theft in the service of a good story.

“Your room?” I guess.

“Lobby,” he says.

By 11:20 AM, we’re back in the Shadow Bar. It’s starting to fill with the people who are going to bring this show off, and I can feel Ty Stewart getting cranked up by the activity. Angele, who sometimes seems like an ACTUAL angel, has been living in London since the end of the Series. Her job is to make real any whimsical idea that passes scrutiny.

Let’s have a players buffet here. Let’s have the money brought in bundles of £20 notes. Let’s have color-coded bracelets we give to players who make the final table for friends-and-family seating.

Angele’s job is to do all that, all the time. Right now she’s occupied with final-table spectator seating. What part of this tiny room is designated for friends and family? How do they get the bracelets? How many per player? How do we fill seats (for TV) after players and their rooting sections leave? Who checks the bracelets?

Chris from breakfast is back. Now he’s wearing a dark suit and somehow no longer looks like the amount of sleep he got last night should be measured in minutes rather than hours. He is working on the placement and content of the video monitors in the room – positioning the monitor with the playing clock for the players, the flop-monitor for the audience, how it will look on TV.

George, who works with ESPN on the World Series broadcasts, has been brought out as a consultant for staging the final table. (ESPN is not part of this production and with Harrah’s and its agency-partner IMG as principals, Ty Stewart has much more hands-on responsibility for the TV production.) George has the felt off the table and is dusting each of the hole-card cameras.

Stewart paces around the room, talking almost simultaneously with Angele, Chris, and George about their different tasks.

“We want all eyes forward when the camera pans on them. Place the monitors with that in mind.”

“How’s it going, George?”

Ty shoots out of the room and is back a minute later, at 11:25 AM, starting a new discussion with Angele and Chris about the press conference. He checks his phone and sends Angele, standing four feet from him, a text message.

“I’m going to check on production,” he announces, walking quickly from the Shadow Bar. He is intercepted by one of the Betfair guys, who asks him how they can get a phone line for an upcoming radio interview. Rupert, the TV producer, mentions “there’s no coffee in the Betfair lounge.” Stewart directs people to help with both matters and by 11:30 AM is upstairs in a converted bar that is serving as the studio for pre-game interviews of the final table players.

Matthew McCullough, a tall redhead and the chip leader, is being interviews as we quietly enter. I stand by the door but Ty crouches low and huddles behind a couch, just out of the shot. He wants to see how it’s going and get an idea of what questions they are asking, and what the players are saying.

McCullough is the last American standing in a field that included Hellmuth, Chan, four Brunsons, Ferguson, Forrest, Lederer, Duke, Harman, Lindgren, over 100 bracelet winners, and almost every face familiar to poker players in North America. But this is a European production and there aren’t even plans to broadcast this on U.S. television.

Still, it’s odd enough that when asked how he feels, no one will argue when Matthew says, “It’s surreal.”

We leave when McCullough’s interview is over at 11:40 AM and the three of us almost fill the tiny elevator. Matthew is going to the players lounge to relax. “I’m going to law down and listen to my iPod.” He tells us along the way that this is his first World Series event ever. The biggest tournament he ever entered before this was at the Borgata and had a $280 buy-in.

At 11:45, Ty is back in the Shadow Bar, carrying two stanchions. He is fussing with the number of seats, their angle, and accommodating the separate needs of spectators, sponsor, and media – and the TV production.

He passes Nick Geber, Bluff’s broadcaster. (Bluff is doing a streaming internet broadcast of the final table and has an enormous of equipment set up as a studio on a landing outside one of the Shadow Bar doors.) They have a brief discussion about the 2008 World Series of Poker, for which Ty has a blockbuster idea.

He wants to broadcast the Main Event final table LIVE.

WITH HOLE CARDS.

The idea would be to play down to the final table and then adjourn the Series. All the other episodes of the Main Event would air and TV would have a couple months to get to know the players. Then they would reconvene and play a sequestered final table and the later portion of the final table would be broadcast live. The audience would see every player’s cards and commentators would be able to analyze the strategy in real time.

Potential problems abound: technical issues, gaming control issues, player reaction, broadcaster reaction. But Ty Stewart sees The Big Picture. This has the potential to turn televised poker into a fringe sports-like activity with a loyal but scattered audience into a reality-programming phenomenon on the order of Survivor, American Idol, or Dancing with the Stars.

Stewart and Geber talk about the progress on the live-broadcast idea and Nick uses the opportunity to ask about several other aspects of the 2008 Series which are still under wraps: How many events? How many 2-hour ESPN broadcasts? Will moving the broadcasts later into the fall increase viewership? (Yes, according to Ty.)

At 11:50, Ty leaves the Shadow Box almost as soon as he enters it following the discussion with Nick Geber. He checks out the signage that will accompany the press conference, which will take place on the wide landing outside the Flame Bar.

Back in the Shadow Bar, George is using a lint brush to clean the final-table felt. Rupert explains how they will be removing the jib – the overhead camera that operates on a crane at the World Series to provide those soaring signature shots – at the dinner break.

“Why?” Ty asks. He’s not happy about losing anything that enhances the television production, especially if he doesn’t understand what’s being gained through the sacrifice.

“Because the room will be too crowded to use the jib.” Frankly, the room seems too crowded to use a Kleenex. I’m pretty sure Ty can touch the ceiling in here without much effort, so it’s a wonder an overhead ANYTHING can operate.

“Are you sure? Because I don’t want to lose a shot.”

They switch to choreographing the bracelet presentation. Ty, standing next to Rupert at the final table, towers over him and the low-hanging overhead lighting seems in danger of crowning him if he moves suddenly. “There will be three people,” he explains to Rupert.

“Are they all short?”

Then they go on to how the money will be brought to the final table. Angele arranged for the Corps of Commissionaires to bring in the money. The Corps is an elite security service in Great Britain with over a century of history. They have long been associated with the English military and wear military-style uniforms. Angele, Rupert, and Ty work out how and when this will happen. Where on the table will the money be? How much space will it take? Where will the bracelet go? How many players will be left when this happens? Where will the remaining players be sitting at the table?

The Commissionaires will bring the money at 9:15 PM, 100 bricks of £20 notes. What happens if we get to 4- or 3- handed or heads up before the Commissionaires arrive? Rupert wants to know if they should film the money coming into the room from outside the Shadow Bar. Where is it coming from?

Ty: “We can make the money come out of anywhere.”

They run through the bracelet ceremony with Stewart playing all three parts – Jeffrey Pollack, Betfair’s David Yu, and Corum’s Michael Wunderman.

By 12:20 PM, there are at least a dozen people working in the Shadow Bar, engaged in at least three discussions. Ty is part of all three of them and is also moving chairs into the positions he wants them.

At 12:22 PM, Ty Stewart loses the jacket. “I’m going to get more stanchions.” He disappears for three minutes and lugs a pair of stanchions into the room. After placing them where he wants them, he tries pushing the video monitor in the far corner into a better place, out of the most common camera shots. He is trying to move it back but it seems every electrical cord and cable in the room is coiled behind it.

So he climbs behind the monitor, amidst the tangle of wires, and pulls the monitor almost on himself. He is finally satisfied, except for one problem: he is trapped by the bulk of the monitor in front of him and the wires piled where he stands.

He drops into a lineman’s 3-point stance and deftly hops out, under the monitor, beside the monitor-post-stand, and through the jungle of wire. What was Stewart’s with the NFL? I thought was marketing but maybe it was run-blocking.

He immediately crosses the room to his other bane, the placement of the spectator seats. “I just hate this setup,” he mutters. He angles the seats slightly, into better position, but one row of the seats is perched awkwardly on the edge of a riser. Now he’s on the floor, pushing the 30-foot-long riser into position.

He wheels one of the monitors out of the Shadow Bar toward the viewing area being set up next to the press conference. As he pushes it by, one of the technicians says, “Is that your bonus, Ty?”

Back in the Shadow Bar, Stewart is moving seats.

“One last stanchion. I have to worry about the important things.” He retrieves another stanchion and returns to the Shadow Bar. I can’t keep up with him.

It’s 12:30 PM.

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