The Poker Podcast You Should Be Watching Every Week
Co-hosts Justin Young and Art Parmann turned a marketing idea into the Table 1 Podcast and it's become a must-watch show for poker fans and players alike.
Welcome to the third edition of The Overlay. In this issue we’ve got the return of a poker legend, the newest WPT champion, the big news from poker creator Abby Merk, and a feature on the brains behind the Table 1 Podcast.
The Ante
Longtime European Poker Tour fans will remember the days when Johnny Lodden was one of the biggest stars on the tour. The Norwegian poker legend - and the man for whom ‘Lodden Thinks’ is named - showed up at the Merit Poker Carmen Series in Cyprus last week and PokerNews’ Will Shillibier caught up with him.
Read: After Nearly 3 Years Away, Johnny Lodden Makes a Surprise Poker Return
The World Poker Tour wrapped up their visit to Thunder Valley this week. The $3,500 buy-in event had 404 runners, marking the second consecutive year that the field has dropped since 590 players showed up in 2023. Local hero Shawn Daniels won the event for $218,600 cash and a $10,400 seat to the WPT World Championship. Poker.org’s newest addition, Tim Fiorvanti, caught up with the champ after the win.
Read: Shawn Daniels wins WPT Rolling Thunder after wild heads-up battle
If you were paying attention to the Global Poker Awards this year, you undoubtedly noticed Abby Merk winning the award for Rising Star in Content Creation. You know who else noticed? BetMGM. Watch Merk’s announcement below.
There is a really bad Justin Timberlake movie called In Time where time - minutes? hours? - is an actual currency. Well the folks at ClubWPT Gold might have crowned that by adding a feature that allows players to buy a time bank for 20% of their big blind. The new wrinkle wasn’t well received by players.
Read: ClubWPT Gold Under Fire for Charging Players to Use Time Bank
For the second consecutive year, the WSOP will hold their annual WSOP Tournament of Champions, a $1,000,000 freeroll for WSOP bracelet and WSOP Circuit ring winners from the past year, at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. Given how close it is to the start of the WSOP, it’s not a popular choice with Circuit regulars. Craig Tapscott from poker.org talked to four players about their thoughts on the event.
Read: Tournament of Champions in La La Land: What do the Circuit regs think?
A Helicopter Ride to the Hamptons?
It seems that high stakes regular Alan Keating is serious about entering the content game. Over the last three weeks he’s released four videos that have very high production quality and take viewers inside his life. The latest episode seems destined to to be the most popular yet. It’s kinda hard to call it a poker vlog, since there’s not a lot (any?) poker in it, but the glimpse at what he’s got going on is worth the 13 minutes.
Four Hall of Famers for Sale - Kinda
Earlier this year, Leaf Trading Cards released a set dedicated to poker. Each card is autographed and there are a number of cards signed by multiple pros. Quite possibly the best card in the set popped up on eBay. The 1 of 1 card signed by Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Scotty Nguyen, and Eli Elezra has a $2,500 price tag on it currently.
Table 1 Has a Seat Open But Please Don't Bring Your Weed
Justin Young and Art Parmann first met on the felt and the friendship really took off after they both made the final table of a $1,500 tournament in Las Vegas in 2008. In the 16 years since, they’ve become very good friends and now live not that far from each other in Las Vegas. Today, the two professional poker players put that friendship on display every week as co-hosts of the Table 1 Podcast.
“We've seen each other's ups and downs throughout the years and it honestly brought us closer as friends and especially in this business. There are a lot of good people in poker, but sometimes it's tough to find them,” Young said. “But it's kind of an aha moment when you find one or at least think you find one or whatever. And to be honest, I know I found one in Art.”
The podcast was the suggestion of Parmann’s wife, Bobbie. They were brainstorming ways to promote the private game they’d be running in the Table1 room at Aria wanted to open it up to people outside of their existing social circle.
“She was like, ‘Why don't you just do a podcast? You and Justin are pretty funny. You like to hang out and drink and we have the room to record it or whatever. Why don't you just try that and see how it goes?’,” Parmann said. “So we just kind of went for it. I mean, I set up the cell phone and the first episode is us in my garage.”
Yes, the garage. After the first four episodes of Young and Parmann “shooting the shit” with each other, they were a little worried they were running out of things to talk about and discussed the idea of bringing on a guest. They invited a friend of theirs, Chino Rheem to come on the show and Young described it as an ‘aha moment’.
“I've known Chino for fucking years and I knew none of the stories he told on the podcast. I was like, ‘This is fucking awesome. Who else do you think we can con into doing this shit?’,” Young said. “We just kind of went down our rolodexes, blindly asking people and I think we were both kind of surprised, like ’They said yes, now what do we do?’”
“A little known fact about our podcast is that 90% of the episodes are filmed at 10 AM. I know we have beers in our hands - don’t judge us too harshly,” Parmann said. The other thing that catches guests off guard is that the show isn’t filmed at Table 1 - or outside of it even.
“When we got David Williams on … I think the first thing he said was he was like, ‘Wait, you're not actually at the Aria?’,” Parmann said. “It's obviously a green screen. We can't just sit (inside the Aria poker room) and shoot the shit and have nobody walk by.”
Parmann handles all of the video editing, audio mixing, and manages the YouTube channel. It’s not an area of strength for him and he’s learning as he goes. Some of the guests they’ve had on the show have helped out with advice and technical tips.
“The friends we've made just and just how open they are to sharing … it's not that much different than poker, but you don't feel like you're giving up a big secret if you say something, versus in poker you might feel like you need to guard something that you know, but in what I've learned about YouTube and social media is everybody's kind of open to helping each other promote themselves in some way,” Parmann said.
Parmann needs about six hours to put each episode together before posting it on YouTube and other podcast platforms. Since Young isn’t involved in that aspect of the show, he has a more relaxed process for preparing for each show.
“The podcast is at 11, so typically what I'll do, I'll leave my house around 9:30. There's a PT’s (Tavern) about three blocks away from Art's house. I go to the PT’s, I order a beer obviously, and I pull out whatever our guest is on Wikipedia, CardPlayer, Hendon Mob, and I just go down the rabbit hole wherever this person is and I have two beers and over the course of an hour, maybe 45 minutes and I show up and I'm like, ‘Research done, I'm ready to go’.” Young said.
They’ve had a pretty good success rate at getting players to come on the show, including Andrew Lichtenberger, Shaun Deeb, Josh Arieh, Scott Seiver, Nik Airball, and Shannon Shorr. Sometimes they run into challenges with getting guests to commit though.
“A few people have either ignored it or just been like, ‘Oh, not right now’ and then some people, a lot of people say, ‘I actually am working on something, but I'm not doing podcasts yet. Once I have something to promote, I'll come on’,” Parmann said.
“The more disappointing ones are the ones who are like, ‘Yeah, for sure a hundred percent next week’ and then you text them next week they're just like … ghost, ghost, ghost … ‘No, maybe next week’,” Young said.
“I don't think much of that is on purpose. It's just poker players being poker players,” Parmann added.
The wish list of guests they’d like to book includes the usual suspects of Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth but also includes Nick Schulman.
“He’s just the coolest guy in poker, right? You get to hang out with him, maybe some of the cool will rub off on you,” Parmann said.
Sometimes guests will enjoy a beer or some cocktails with the hosts on the show. One guest took a different route. Martin Zamani showed up at the garage and before filming started asked if it was okay if he smoked marijuana on the show. Parmann thought ‘why not’ and Zarmani lit a couple of joints during the show. Neither Young or Parmann partook in the festivities.
“My wife got mad at me for that. The garage smelled like weed for about three weeks,” Parmann joked. “The garage door was open - just straight open - for a week. We just had some of those industrial fans going. Luckily we had one in the shed and didn’t have to buy that.”
The original intention of the show was to promote the Table 1 game that Young and Parmann run. It’s certainly helped in that regard as about two dozen players have reached out, either through their website or by sliding into the DMs, to learn more about how they get a seat.
The show and the Table 1 game have developed into other opportunities for the players. Parmann and Young worked with Brent Hanks at PokerGO to put together some lineups for a show dubbed ‘CashFlow’. The games were filmed in January and began airing recently on PokerGO with Young and Parmann playing alongside some of the regulars from their game.
“Our people that come three or four times a year, they're like, ‘Can this be one of the times? I'd like to play’,” Parmann said. “We had four days, so pretty much everyone that wanted to play at least one time, got to play, which was cool.”
“if I went down the other (career) path and I was an engineer instead, I would've a hundred percent gravitated towards this podcast. A hundred percent would've come out here and wanted to get on PokerGO just to be on TV, just to feel that feeling of, ‘Wow, I'm sitting in the same seat that Phil Ivey sat in. This is crazy.’,” Young said.
Nearly a year and a half after Young and Parmann first set up in the garage with an iphone, they are relatively happy with the show’s current trajectory, even if they don’t quite know what that is exactly.
“I think we're happy with the path we're going down, or at least I am. I’ve always felt like Art has more grandiose goals, expectations isn't the right word, but just wanting it to continue to grow and be more relevant,” Young said. “I kind of like where we are. I'm not saying I wouldn’t love it if we had 50,000 followers tomorrow, but I feel like I'd rather be an A+ to our 4,000 followers as opposed to people just barely not giving a shit with 20,000.”
Parmann is happy too, but also dreams big about what the show could become because dreaming big has no downside.
“I actually heard a really good quote recently. It was about happiness and it was like, ‘If you want to be happy, forget the past, it's over. Accept the present, it's here. Be extremely delusional about the future because ... you have something to always go for. It's kind of like the big version of ‘shoot for the moon, you'll land in the stars’.”