Official State of the Game Podcast Thread - Page 1659

On October 06 2011 02:25 Liquid`Tyler wrote:
Sure, lots of things changed after poker came on TV. It didn't just become more popular. We talked about it. Some people are wary of going on TV because, even if SC2 does become more popular, there may also be bad effects, like the average fan becoming less knowledgeable or the average person respecting us less.

I think you may have misplaced the word "only" and it makes a huge difference. So assuming you were trying to say that we said that poker being televised was the only necessary condition for its popularity, then I think you misunderstood us. We expressed that poker being televised played a key role for its boom. The way the presentation of the game was directed was new. Cameras were placed to detect the contents of hidden cards so the viewer had all the information. Chance to win the hand displayed as a simple percentage immediately gave the audience information that previously took specialized knowledge and practice to calculate on the fly. And the basic rules of the game were explained multiple times a broadcast.

Another key factor was poker's emergence in the online gaming world. Played physically, poker is considered too inconvenient and slow by many. Online poker made the game significantly easier to play than ever before. These two key factors fed off each other, as budding poker players wanted to watch the pros and spectators wanted to give the game a try. Of course, SC2 already has this so it was not worth mentioning. Though it's fair to concede that online poker was more convenient since its software was free and had low system requirements.

I believe you understand the similarities and differences between multiple necessary conditions and a single necessary condition. And I'm sure you understand that in complicated real world scenarios, it's often impossible to prove that any part was necessary. The imagination can usually convince us that it could have happened in an entirely different way. So identifying a necessary condition is very difficult. The best we can usually do is look at the situation and reason about which factors, when removed, would have made that specific situation fail. I think it's safe to say that poker's new style of televised content was one such factor for its boom. We didn't mean to make any more ambitious claim than that. But it very well could be that that was the only way it could have happened at that time. So it's similarly ambitious to deny that going on TV wasn't the only necessary condition. It's best to leave such claims alone as we shouldn't pretend or aspire to have such certainty.