Comedians Play Poker

The YouTube channel All Things Comedy got five famous comedians together to play a session of $1/$2 cash game - the plays made it obvious that these men didn’t build their reputation at the card tables. The best known of the five is probably Bill Burr, a widely popular stand-up comedian who also appeared on the drama series Breaking Bad.

Bill Burr, Al Madrigal, Jay Larson, Bobby Lee & Eddie Pepitone - we’ll most likely never see this line-up at the final table of any major tournament. These people are not cardplayers, they are professionals of another tough business, comedy. They got together to shoot a skit for a mildly successful comedy website, All Things Comedy - they get a few hundred thousand visitors a month on their website, while their YouTube channel where the video was posted garnered a total of 669,000 views after 723 uploads.

Bill Burr is the biggest celebrity of the five poker rookies, he performs his stand-up act to huge audiences around the country, has a popular podcast, a cartoon show on Netflix and appeared in the 2013 big budget comedy movie The Heat as well as the world famous drama series Breaking Bad. He confessed at the beginning of the video that he does not play cards - or golf - as growing up he always thought it was “an old lady thing” although he did “watch the thing on ESPN”, most likely referring to the WSOP. 

The other name that is most likely to be recognized is Bobby Lee - he was featured in the first installment of the Harold & Kumar movie series. 

As we mentioned, none of them are professional or even avid amateur poker players. The one who seemed to have the most knowledge of the game was Jay Larson, he tried the not so easy task of explaining the concept of big and small blind to Burr and Lee, two total newbies to the game. Although even Larson had sometimes trouble understanding it, as once he said the big blind “is guaranteed to see the flop no matter what”, eliminating the possibility of a pre-flop raise - something that hardly ever happened in this game, the players limped the vast majority of the time.

The biggest hand of the night was two full houses chopping a $243 pot: the double paired board ran out ATA T 4, Pepitone was holding AJ while Madrigal had A9. First Pepitone was really excited about his Jack kicker, then he learned how those don’t count with boats.

The players also had to deal with an angle shooting scandal at the table: in one hand Lee admitted he was able to see Burr’s hole cards but did not speak up until the river. In the post-game interview Lee added that he actually saw every single hand the player sitting to his right, Burr was dealt. This earned him the label “cheater” in the other players’ eyes - what added insult to injury was that Lee ended up being the biggest winner of the night, bagging a $342 stack. Pepitone ended the session with $305, Madrigal with $153, while Larson and Burr got stacked during the game.

Don’t expect to see too much high-level poker strategy, however. Even one of the players in the game, Al Madrigal admits it:

“This is not textbook poker at all. I mean this is really as bad as you can play”.