Who cares about his voice? Gripsed provides some of the best MTT strategy videos for free.
I definitely care about their voice if I need to spend a long time listening to a video or a stream; it's far more likely that I will be distracted otherwise. I have tried listening to four poker streams so far.
Jason Somerville is far and away my favourite, although we haven't seen much of him for the last week or so.
Jaime Staples comes across as a really nice guy and has been around a lot more than Jason Somerville recently. The only small frustration with him is that he talks as if everybody has the full Twitch page running with chat open and links etc. and seems to forget that some people have him in a pop-out window and are doing other things at the same time. Whereas Jason Somerville will read out the question that he is responding to and then try to answer it, Jaime has a habit of just saying the name of the person in chat that asked a question and then giving the answer without specifying what the question was, which is not as useful in my circumstances. Also, because he tends to have four tables running, I need to use quite a large window if I'm going to read what is happening on the tables. He's my second favourite although I am fairly new to poker streaming.
I found
Gripsed's stream much, much more frustrating to watch than the previous two. He has some
chips near his microphone that he keeps messing about with very noisily. I watch things like this when the other members of the household are in bed and he has a habit of talking quietly, so I turn the volume up in order to hear him, then he suddenly starts yelling at the screen when something "exciting" happens, like when somebody with AA hits another A on the flop, his all-in caller with JJ hits a J on the turn but then hits a fourth J on the river. This then ends up waking the sleeping members of my household. There are adverts on his screen, one of which he makes sound like a poker book he has written but as far as I can tell is actually only an ebook. Every now and again the screen will be completely filled with this picture of a poker book for five or six minutes at a time. Another one is in badly-written English with a word missing and appears to talk about the possibility of winning 1% of his action if you subscribe, it has a black oblong in the top right corner of it which invites you to click it for more info but obviously you can't click on a link when it is on a Twitch display. There is a bar across the bottom which says that there are raffles every half an hour (?) then when someone asks about an hour after the last one if there will be another raffle "Oh, maybe there will, maybe there won't". To be pefectly honest this guy comes across to me as a bit of a shyster, so I really can't make my mind up, but I will continue watching him if neither of the other two are on. He also got really arsey when StickyRice started streaming poker and his number of viewers dropped from about 750 to about 500 in a very short space of time, which I found hilarious. The more annoyed he gets, the more camp he seems to sound
The one that I won't even bother going back to is TableGrinders. I don't really know how to describe it other than to say it reminds me of the sort of discussion that I have come across at another (much larger)
poker forum on the few occasions that I have visited there. Snide, immature, testosterone-filled stuff from people who think they're far smarter than everyone else. I asked why one of them had such great sound quality and the other one sounded as if they were casting from the bottom of an echo chamber, then one of the mods said "I'll cut you". It seemed like a reasonable question to me but I saved them the trouble by shutting the stream, unfollowing and removing the link from my toolbar. They seemed to give far less advice on why they played
hands the way they did than the other streams, and were far more likely to be talking about what stocks and shares they had bought this week during the few hours that I was there.
I think it's fairly obvious why somebody's voice would matter, without wanting to sound overly disrespectful.