I like Blackjack and I used to like watching Blackjack tournaments on TV. The new season of The Ultimate Blackjack Tour has just begun airing on CBS and I think it'll be airing without me watching. What we have here is almost a textbook example of how to gimmick a show up with fancy lights, music and editing to the point of making it unwatchable.
In any kind of sporting event, you need at least a reasonable sensation of a live game; like you're witnessing something actually occurring before your eyes and anything can happen. Blackjack tourneys on TV do away with that. On the UBT, a single match consists of thirty hands of Blackjack and to get that all in to an hour, they have to skip over a lot of hands, summarizing them in fast forward. Imagine a baseball game where you come back from commercial and the announcer says, "While you were gone, they played the third, fourth and fifth innings and here's what happened."
Of course, they wouldn't do that. They wouldn't even air a baseball game that had been taped weeks earlier. But if you're going to do that, you need to at least try to preserve the sense that it's a real contest with an outcome that's in doubt. The shows they're airing are so tricked up with music and lights and computer graphics and breakneck cutting that they lose all sense of a real event. At times, I can't even follow who's playing who's ahead…or care.
The one nice thing about the UBT broadcasts on CBS is that they're almost wholly sponsored by ClubUBT, an online gaming site. In fact, the shows are like a glorified infomercial for ClubUBT, which I like because one of their spokespersons is my old pal, Carl "The Amazing" Ballantine. It's always nice to see Carl, even when he isn't doing his legendary magic act.