This USA Network show was arguably the worst piece of filth to sully the airwaves since The Blame Game. The premise was as follows: A male team and a female team answer trivia questions in order to get oversized playing cards which they use to build a good hand. The losers of each hand have to remove one piece of clothing.

Contestants were chosen for their overall good looks and utter lack of any intelligence whatsoever. I'm not sure whether this is because stupid people generally had to take more clothes off or because only complete idiots would try to be on the show in the first place. Most of the questions were things you would find out of Trivial Pursuit: Junior Edition, like "What is the force that pulls objects towards the ground?" and "Who delivered the Gettysburg address?" As you can easily imagine, the contestants were regularly stumped by the mind-boggling complexity of these questions.

Most contestants, especially the women, also tended to have no knowledge of poker, either. They were given the choice to keep the card they received for each correctly answered question or give it to their opponents, and you could regularly see people losing the game because they gave away cards that were useless to them but extremely useful to their opponents.

The only reason to watch this show was to see the look on the host's face whenever he came across a particularly dense contestant. This was THE show to go to if you wanted to learn how to plead for death without uttering a single word.

In fact, the skill of the contestants on the USA Network's "Strip Poker" show is so low that the hostess actually has to identify the cards for the morons. Possibly the worst thing about the show, though, is that the contestants typically aren't that attractive. I know women who are ten times more attractive than the contestants, and actually have a clue as well. (One of these days the media will figure out that, generally, most guys like an attractive "girl next door type" rather than a porn-star type. Of course, I have to take exception to that a bit, because the average "girl next door" is probably pretty stupid given how dumb the average member of society is, but the point is there. I digress.)

However, the worst thing about it is that the USA Network can actually justify, by viewership, having this show on TV in the 11/10PM Eastern/Central timeslot Tuesday through Saturday. Of course, because this is American cable TV, viewers never actually see any nudity, which is actually good, since I don't want to be blinded while channel-surfing.

Next month they'll probably come out with something worse. I'm thinking maybe a knock-off of MTV's Undressed show, which is itself pretty bad. Perhaps USA Network's "Minds Unplugged: Low Mental Wattage."

I looked at this and was dismayed to find two writeups on an American TV show and none on the classic party game.

This game is played over several beers and the basic objective is to get the members of the opposite, or indeed the same sex naked.

One version of the rules is as follows:

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Rules

1. Decide how far you are prepared to go. Until you are naked is probably best, you need the tension to play well, also it does get boring and people start to do other things because they know there is nothing to look forward to.
2. Decide when you get your clothes back, at the end of the game? The night? The Party? The Year?
3. Decide what you do once you are naked, i.e. can you keep playing, using forfeits or do you leave the game? If so where do you go?
4. Give everyone five chips each.
5. Ante up, one chip or alternatively, one item of clothing.
6. Play a standard game of five card stud.
7. Show your cards, the winner gets the pot, the clothes in the pot go to the "clothes bank" where you can buy them back for seven chips each. The loser must also give one additional item of clothing to the bank.
8. If you run out of chips you buy five more for one item of clothing.
9. The game ends when either one, half or all but one of the people present is naked.

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This node was written nearly seven years ago when I was only just 16. I am planning to rewrite it. Watch this space.

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