Current Affairs

Rip Reed: Thanks God, A dog pile of piss poor physique on top of a small cock and hereditary alcoholism, I appreciate it!... I'm babbling. I do that drunk.

”Smoking Aces”

The poker on the weekend started off well, and then went pear shaped for a nett result of $25 in the red. Can’t really complain as I played really well early on when it was short handed, and then went it became a full table with multiple calling stations I was only able to capitalise once for the night while everyone else made a killing off them. Nevermind.

I had a little more luck with the online ring games, finally getting some decent hands in and results. I was down half a buy in and then came back to post a modest profit, covering a dismal showing in a SNG where I was wiped out within the first orbit.

But what I really wanted to talk about today is another of my pet hates – current affairs programs. We have two main ones on a weeknight in Australia called “A Current Affair” and the other is “Today Tonight”. Both are crap and scrap the bottom of the barrel for quasi-current affairs. Every year they do a story about what is really in meat pies – one usually a month or so after the other, like this is a news worthy story. There is a plethora of examples of their tactics and cheque-book journalism in the papers seemingly everyday. And then they follow that up with a hard hitting story on which laundry powder is best for you.

What really got me though was last week they advertised that a story was coming up about Joe Hachem, and how he has been struggling with the new found fame he has. I thought great, here is something I can watch and perhaps even have something to talk about to my poker buddies and even right here.

Instead, what was presented was a 5 minutes story that included perhaps 3 and a half minutes of “Casino Royale”, then 1 minute and 40 seconds recapping of how “one lucky hand” won Joe $10m (in Aussie dollars, it was about that before tax). I thought that was a bit offensive to Joe, seeing as he had to go through five days and a 14 hour session on the final to get that one lucky hand, but there you go. The final 20 second was Joe saying he is now a lot more famous than he thought he would be and he is thinking of moving. That’s about it.

There is no story there. Not that I blame Hachem, probably made a couple of grand on it so why the hell not – and it’s not like he was the one that wrote the story. What annoyed me even more is that obviously this story was only put in to have a poker story, and to sucker in the punters that would watch for that reason. I was one of those punters. I was sucked in. I never watch this current affairs shows and made an exception on this one case because of the story, and was immediately reminded of why I never watch these shows. Although I guess in a way it did give me something to write about.