Norman Chad agreed to provide color commentary on every one of the 420,084 entries in GGPoker's $5 Ocean KO, a booking that GGPoker confirmed only after Chad had already begun. The first entry to receive his attention folded pocket fours on the button, which he described to nobody in particular as a decision.
The assignment came together over a single weekend, after the event broke the 253,692-entry record that PokerStars set in 2015 with Common Cents. Chad, a commentator who has spent decades calling poker for people who mostly do not play it, reportedly saw the number and concluded that 420,084 players deserved at least one person watching them with sustained disappointment. He had no co-host. Lon McEachern was contacted, according to the story as it reached us, and responded that he would be available for the final table.
The Details
Chad worked from a folding table, a laptop, and a single monitor that cycled through tables at a rate of roughly one every four seconds. At that pace a full pass through the field took a little over nineteen days, which Chad noted was longer than the tournament would last. He decided this was a scheduling problem for the tournament.
The workload produced a system. A player who called with a weak hand received what the broadcast notes described as a gentle observation about the player's relationship to money. A player who folded a strong hand received a longer observation about the player's relationship to everything else. A player who won a knockout with a random multiplier was informed, in measured tones, that this was the poker equivalent of finding a twenty in a coat. Chad had been told the jackpot multipliers could reach 400 times the bounty. He asked whether the bounty was the five dollars. Told that it was roughly that, he said nothing for several minutes.
By the end of Day 1 Chad had covered 180,000 entries and exhausted what colleagues described as his standing supply of similes. Staff said he moved on to a second supply, which concerned his family's grocery bills, and then a third, which was believed to concern Washington traffic. Neither ran short. At least 24,134 players made it to Day 2, a figure Chad received as a personal reduction in his workload, though not a large one.
What Happens Next
The commentary was not broadcast. It was delivered, in full, to a recording that Chad asked GGPoker to store somewhere permanent. GGPoker did not say where. The tournament's first prize was $43,938, and Chad observed, for the record, that this was a lot of money to win for beating 420,083 people who were playing for five dollars.
Asked whether he planned to stop, Chad was reported to have said the field was still entering, which he considered a kind of answer. The Ocean KO opener finished. Chad, GGPoker confirmed, had not.
Nothing about this happened. Norman Chad did not commentate every entry in the Ocean KO, and GGPoker did not hire him for it. The field size and prize are real; everything else is invented.
