In my last piece, I reminisced over five moments from the early days of the Chip Race podcast. Continuing from that, here’s five more memories from the poker podcast, hosted by myself and fellow VegasSlotsOnline News man David Lappin.
6. We appear to be dying
I’m not going to lie: after a bright start to the second season, things went downhill fast. We struggled to get guests that meant much to our audience, and the listener numbers reflected that, dropping from episode to episode. At the same time, we were struggling on the sound quality front, quickly working our way through several sound engineers (in the end David decided he’d have to bite the bullet and learn to do the job himself, which he continues to do to this day). While we had reasonably well-known English friends we tapped up to come on the show, they didn’t seem to be resonating with our audience. That wasn’t their fault: we were learning our craft as interviewers and everything else needed at the time.
7. I’m not sure Pads is a lead guest, Dara
We finally arrested our seemingly terminal decline when we landed Jake Cody as a guest. He resonated so well with our audience we finally had a clear idea of the type of guests we needed to attract. Keen to keep the momentum going, I approached Pads (Patrick Leonard) who I had never met in person but had interacted with a fair bit online, enough to know he’d make a great guest. When I told David, he was somewhat underwhelmed, not convinced Pads was a big enough name. Then even more than now, David basically lived on Twitter, and he pointed out Pads didn’t have a big following at the time. I put my foot down and we arranged to interview him when David and I were sharing a hotel room at UKIPT Bristol. On the day, our internet was hopeless, and most of the time we couldn’t hear what Patrick was saying. This made for a very disjointed interview, but we were relying on the old “we will fix it in post production” cliche. Back then we didn’t use Zoom or any other central recording: instead we both recorded our ends, and also asked the guests to record theirs. David would then stitch the interview together from the three recordings.
a home run with our audience and solidified our listenership numbers
In the days that followed, I chased Patrick to send his recording, and although he kept saying he would, never did. After a period of radio silence, I talked to someone who knew him quite well and used to work with him about it, and they suggested that it sounded like Patrick either never recorded his end or had lost it, but was reluctant to admit it. Armed with this information, I went back to Patrick and asked him if it might be better to rerecord the interview entirely as it was very disjointed given we couldn’t hear him most of the time, and he snap agreed and gave us a tremendous second interview which was a home run with our audience and solidified our listenership numbers.
8. The wonderful Miss Tilly
By now, we had no problem attracting top notch European guests, but America was a different story. When you ask a big name to come on your show, it’s only natural they will look at the list of people who have already been on, and if it’s a bunch of Europeans they’ve never heard of, it’s also natural they’ll decline. Any millionaire will tell you the first million is the most difficult, and so it seemed to be the case here.
I’d interacted quite a bit online with Jennifer Tilly, as we both wrote for Bluff Magazine and our senses of humour seemed to align. I therefore chanced my arm and sent her a DM asking her to come on the show, and she agreed within seconds, with one caveat: the interview had to be done in person. I obviously had no problem with that, and we arranged for me to interview her at the WSOP (David wasn’t travelling to it so the original idea was for me to do it solo). Unfortunately, before I arrived, Jen had to leave Vegas due to a family health emergency. She contacted me a few weeks later to say she was doing a day of interviews in a London hotel to promote the latest Chucky movie, and could fit us in. A spanner was thrown in the works when the film production company flat out refused to put an obscure Irish podcast on the list, but the ever resourceful and generous Jen came up with a solution: she gave up her lunch break to talk to us. The interview itself was a delight: we gelled with her instantly and she seemed to be able to anticipate all our questions from the first few words. It’s fair to say she wasn’t entirely sure who David was and at one point when he interjected into an exchange between myself and Jen about playing live, she came out with my all time favourite line from the show:
“Oh….do you play poker too David?”
This is a line that has become a running joke in the years since, with several other guests posing it. As a final bonus, Jen had the film crew film the whole interview and furnish us with the footage, which kickstarted our YouTube channel which had been struggling to that point. Once we had Jen’s name on the list of past guests it suddenly became a lot easier to get other Americans (and Jen herself lined up a few for us, including Phil Laak and Antonio Esfandiari).
9. Mrs Doke steals the show
In the early days of the show, our most valuable listener and critic was my wife. Never one to pull her punches, she was often scathing in her criticisms of what we were getting wrong, while also forthcoming about what we were getting right. In the first season, she usually drove me to the studio every Monday so was there in person to hear it being recorded, and I immediately recognised the value of her instant feedback. When we came back and everything was recorded offline, I always gave each episode to her to listen and then fled downstairs before her stream of French invectives started. She’d write up a slightly more diplomatic version of her criticisms which I’d then forward to David, who I’m pretty sure dreaded every Tuesday afternoon knowing what was coming. As such, she probably shaped the show more than anyone else in the early days, and helped accelerate our learning curve.
By the time it came to record our 50th show, we were well established and had a very loyal audience. We decided to interview all our partners for one segment (by now there were four people regularly involved in the show. With the greatest possible respect to the other partners, Mireille simply stole the show, so she became almost the entire segment. When it came to recording it, she insisted I couldn’t be with her in the room, so on the day I set up at my desk downstairs while she went upstairs to her computer. Her interview was so popular with our listeners that when we ran a poll to see which guest they most wanted back for the 100th show, she won in a landslide.
10. Phil’s pissed off
By season 4, the show’s numbers had grown steadily to roughly three times what they were when we started, and came back. We decided to shoot for the stars in terms of a big name guest and go for the biggest of them all: Phil Hellmuth. He and I shared a sponsor at the time (a hand replay app called ShareMyPair) so I asked the CEO to ask Phil for us. To our delight he said yes. In the weeks running up to the interview we told people we had a really massive name lined up but couldn’t say who it was. Dozens of people guessed and nobody guessed Hellmuth, I presume because the idea of him coming on the show seemed inconceivable.
On the day, Phil showed up in his customary sponsors gear, and I do mean all of it, including the Aria hat. We politely told him he was more than welcome to wear the gear but our listeners wouldn’t see it since we were an audio only podcast. This, it turned out, was not welcome news to Phil, who starting tilting and expressing the view it was pointless to proceed. In the end, he grudgingly said he’d give us ten minutes. The thought that our much vaunted “big 8 interview” wouldn’t amount to more than ten minutes of Phil grumpily running through the list of his sponsors was alarming to say the least, so I sent David a message with an idea: instead of trying to cram the interview into a few minutes, let’s just spend the ten minutes explaining to Phil why he is the person we and indeed any sane person on poker admires the most, why he is the clear GOAT, yet somehow underrated.
a compelling picture of how he evolved into the Poker brat
The strategy worked. At the end of the ten minutes Phil was in a great mood and we kicked into the interview. It was meant to last 20-30 minutes but he was in such a good mood he stayed talking to us for over an hour, and only left when his wife all but dragged him away to do some chore. As a result, we had enough not just for one show but for two, both of which doubled our listenership over night. I’ve listened to many Phil interviews since, and he came back in the show, but this one remains my favourite as he opened up about his childhood insecurities to paint a compelling picture of how he evolved into the Poker brat.
That concludes my trip down memory lane to key moments in the early days of the Chip Race. Shows like ours live and die on their guests, and getting the best out of them. We always try to shine a positive light on what makes each guest unique and interesting, and we are immensely grateful to everyone who takes the time to come on the show, and to everyone who listens
