The production team behind a new cash game show spent Tuesday night trying to fix a camera that was working correctly, after its heart rate system reported Phil Ivey at 48 beats per minute for six straight hours.
The show intends to put live heart rates on screen using a camera technique that reads a pulse off the skin of a face, and in testing the graphic has worked on everyone it has been pointed at. Players climb in big pots, drift back down between hands, jump when they get raised. The number moves, which is the whole reason it is on screen. Ivey's arrived at 48 in the first orbit and stayed there.
Closer In
The first assumption in the truck was a frozen frame. A technician confirmed the feed was live by watching Ivey blink. The second assumption was lighting, so a lamp was moved nine inches to the left at 9:40 and the reading held. The camera itself was swapped at 10:15. The replacement also reported 48. A floor supervisor was asked to sit in the seat as a control and produced a perfectly normal 71, which climbed to 88 the moment somebody mentioned he was on camera.
By midnight the effort had escalated. Engineers borrowed a chest strap monitor from the hotel gym and asked Ivey to wear it between hands. It read 48. They asked him to hold his breath for thirty seconds, a test that moves everybody, and it read 48. One engineer then took the strap off Ivey, put it on himself, recorded a 104 and told the truck this was reassuring.
Graphics had a separate problem. The overlay was built with a live trace running behind the number, and a trace that does not move looks like a broken graphic rather than a calm player. A producer proposed adding a programmed jitter of one or two beats so viewers would trust the display. That was rejected as inventing a number, and the department settled for a second readout showing the gap between Ivey and the table average, which ran between 34 and 51 for most of the night.
The biggest pot of the session came at 1:50 in the morning and was worth $1,240,000. Ivey put in the last raise and then waited eleven minutes for a decision from the far end of the table. Two players not in the hand crossed 120 watching it. The number under Ivey's name sat where it had sat since dinner. The director cut away from him twice during those eleven minutes on the grounds that a static readout is bad television, then cut back on the grounds that a static readout was the most interesting thing on the broadcast.
After That
At 2:14 Ivey won a routine pot and the display moved to 49 for eleven seconds. Three people in the truck cheered. It was back to 48 before anyone got a screenshot, and the rest of the night was spent arguing over whether the spike had been real or a compression artifact.
The show has not decided whether Ivey's readout stays on air. One producer has suggested replacing the live feed with a still image of the number 48, on the grounds that it would be accurate.
Nothing about this happened. A cash game show planning to put live heart rates on screen is real; Phil Ivey has not been measured at 48 beats per minute for six hours, and no camera was replaced over it.
