Rob Gardner, the creative force and producer of the pioneering and massively influential U.K. poker TV show Late Night Poker, died earlier this week at age 34. Rob was widely known and highly respected in the European poker community and it is with great sadness that news of his premature passing has been received.
His longtime friend and collaborator, Jesse May, with whom Rob presented a wry and wickedly funny podcast during this year's World Series of Poker, wrote a moving tribute on U.K. forums to a man many consider as one of the driving forces behind the poker explosion of the last decade.
"It is with great sadness that I just found out about the news that our friend Rob Gardner has passed away. We knew he was ill, but still his death has come as a huge shock to all who knew and loved him. Right now our thoughts go out of course to his two young children Isaac and Erin and his love Heather, and to all his family.
"For a man so young, Rob touched more people than a life has any right to expect. He reached them with his ideas, with his creativity, with his laughter, with his love for people, and for the world of poker.
"He loved the Devilfish, Padraig Parkinson, Surindar Sunar, and Leyton Orient football. He always cheered for Mad Marty, The Hendon Mob, and Simon Trumper. He had more ideas than any man I've ever known or will. He loved drama, television, and never even once considered thinking inside of the box. There are so many people who claim to have invented it, but if you spent any time with Rob at all you'd know he's the only one nutty enough to have dreamt up televised poker. Rob was the one who had the fire that burned for the idea. He was the only one who could dream it up, write it down on a piece of A4 paper and then sit in front of the Channel 4 commissioner in 1998 with a straight face and tell him that people coming home from the pub were going to love this at 3am. And they did. Late Night Poker was Rob's baby. And he knew what it was that would make it great. He saw the drama, he saw the humanity. And when people reminisce about why those early televised poker shows were so good and are still so good, they know they like them but they don't know why. It's because of what Rob Gardner gave them.
"He loved downtown Las Vegas. The first year we went to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, it was on a shoestring and a half of a promise. Rob loved Binion's, spent three weeks in a room at the California hotel and never gambled once. Didn't play poker, didn't gamble, just soaked it all up. The year before Rob had been there, when Julian and Scott and John Shipley were at the final table of the World Series of Poker. And Rob stopped by on his way back from Arizona. He walked into where they were filming the final table and instantly saw fifty ways to make it better. What are they doing what are they doing? Don't they know what they have? He loved hustlers, loved cons, and loved the history of Vegas. He was obsessed with puppets.
"When we did the poker show for the summer in Las Vegas, nobody realized that it was all Rob Gardner, it was his creation. He hated to hold a camera and hated more to be in front of one, and yet it was all him, it was Rob holding the show together. People would see the show, they'd come by the house, they'd take one look at Padraig and then one look at me and then they never knew. But Rob was the nuttiest of them all. He looked so mild mannered, in his button down shirt and plain blue jeans. But he was the craziest of the lot, the wildest I have ever known, he could sit there with a calm face and explain something so outlandish you would just say no way. He sat there with a straight face and explained that people were going to enjoy watching poker. They would have thought you were mad.
"Oh the ideas he came up with. Loved stealing menus from American coffee shops, he was obsessed with large American breakfasts. He could drink coffee all day long. He almost never bothered to eat. He had a string of the wackiest ideas you could ever have.
"He could talk for hours on end about English football, poker players, movies, and popular culture. He loved to read and loved to write. He could pull ideas out of the thin air. He always knew what made great TV. It didn't matter how wacky it was. If Rob liked it, it would fly. The Gamboleers - a band of poker playing Muppets in a beat-up bus. The Poker Shuffle, a synchronized poker dance set to a Caribbean beat. Off the Wall, sometimes it was so crazy that even Padraig had to say no. Getting 50 foreign poker players to sing different verses of America the Beautiful. Beat the Bookie, where he'd film leaves blowing around a field. Or two hours on tape of pigeons sitting on a fence. With a straight face, he would just convince you to go for it. It's gotta be done, he'd say. And of course you'd believe him. He had the best taste for television and comedy I've ever seen. He just knew. That's perfect, he'd say. But let's do it again. Excellent, he'd say. Let's do it just another time for luck. Only Rob knew when it was done right. And he always was.
"There was never really a question of going to the World Series of Poker this year without Rob. For a man who rarely played poker and almost never gambled, he just got Vegas and the World Series of Poker all the way. For me, he was the spirit of what the world of poker is supposed to be. The last time we were in Vegas together, this past February for the Super Bowl, Rob and I left the Strip one night and just headed downtown. We prowled Binion's and drank coffee at the Starbucks outside the Golden Nugget, where you sit out in the chill at 3 a.m. and just watch Vegas happen.
"I've lost part of me today. We've lost our partner, our muse, and our friend. Rest in peace, Rob. We won't forget you."
Rob's most recent work can be viewed at www.luckbox.tv.
CardPlayer.com sends its sincere condolences to his family and friends.
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