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Next Week on TV: WPT's World Poker Finals

Date: Fri, Jun 6, 2008

Next week's WPT episode is the World Poker Finals from Foxwoods. The players are Nenad Medic, Nick Schulman, Tom Dwan (one of the best online poker players in the world, better known by his screenname durrr), Mark Weitzman, Michael Vela, and Mike White.

Check our poker on TV schedule for the list of shows regularly running new episodes, sign up for our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our feed, and contact me with any suggestions or corrections.

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World Series of Poker Live Broadcasts Start Friday

Date: Wed, Jun 4, 2008

24 of the World Series of Poker's events will be be broadcast over the internet at WorldSeriesOfPoker.com without hole cards, on a one-hour delay. They're starting with Event 7 on Friday. The schedule is here.

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GSN Discussing Poker's Future On the Network

Date: Wed, Jun 4, 2008

In an interview with PokerNews.com, Mori Eskandani mentioned GSN's ongoing discussions about the future of poker on the channel:

Amanda Leatherman: What about High Stakes Poker? Everyone's asking: did it get picked up? What's happening?

Mori Eskandani: I just had, just yesterday, a conversation with GSN and they have several meetings and they still haven't determined just exactly what direction they're going to take poker. So it's poker in general, it's not just High Stakes Poker. If they decide that poker is going to live on GSN, I have no doubt in my mind there's going to be plenty of High Stakes. So, we have to wait.

See also WPT Extends GSN's Option To Air Season 7 Of World Poker Tour and Will High Stakes Poker Return To TV?

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Next Week's TV: World Poker Tour

Date: Sat, May 31, 2008

Next week's WPT episode is the Spanish Championship. Gus Hansen is the chip leader going into the TV table. The other players are Steve Sung, Christer Johansson, Markus Lehmann, Vladimir Poleschchuk, and Ludovic Lacay.

Check our poker on TV schedule for the list of shows regularly running new episodes, sign up for our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our feed, and contact me with any suggestions or corrections.

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NBC and Caesars Sign National Heads-Up Poker Championship Venue Deal

Date: Thu, May 29, 2008

Card Player reports: NBC announced that it has signed a four-year agreement with Caesars Entertainment that makes the Caesars Palace poker room in Las Vegas home to the National Heads-Up Poker Championship through 2012.

See also National Heads-Up Poker Championship Ratings Decline (updated with full season numbers in the comments), National Heads-Up Poker Championship To Award Some Spots To Qualifiers, and National Heads-Up Poker Championship Review.

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WPT Extends GSN's Option To Air Season 7 Of World Poker Tour

Date: Tue, May 27, 2008

WPT Enterprises extended GSN's option to air the upcoming season 7 of the World Poker Tour by two weeks, until June 7, 2008.

There has been speculation that GSN will leave the televised poker market entirely. The CEO who brought in their poker programs is no longer with them, and they recently dropped High Stakes Poker, which had been their highest-rated show until the World Poker Tour. The World Poker Tour isn't profitable, their season six contract with GSN produces less revenue than their old contract with the Travel Channel, and "If, in the future, GSN elects not to continue airing the WPT series and we cannot maintain or replace our agreement with GSN with comparable license agreements, it will be detrimental to the viability of the WPT brand..." (from their 10-K).

At the same time that the WPT is cutting back, and no longer has any televised European events, the WPT's most comparable competitor, the European Poker Tour, is growing (the latest EPT Championship had more prize money than the WPT Championship). PokerStars, sponsor of the EPT, has added tours in Asia and Latin America. The World Series of Poker continues its transformation from championship to tour with the addition of the WSOP Europe. You could write a Harvard Business School case study about the ways in which the WPT has screwed up its incredible opportunity, but I think that one of the worst is its decision to compete with its greatest benefactors by starting an online poker room. As PokerStars, the largest online poker room, sponsors the EPT, it would be natural for the #2 online poker room, Full Tilt, to sponsor the WPT... if only they weren't competing with each other.

Most of the major US tournaments, with the exception of the WSOP, have contracts with the WPT. It would be a great loss if so many of the greatest tournaments in the country that invented poker were no longer televised.

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Birth of the World Poker Tour

Date: Mon, May 26, 2008

Tom Sexton has a good article on PokerNews.com detailing the birth of televised poker, particularly the World Poker Tour. We also have a few other articles on the history of televised poker: see History of the Poker Boom.

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Next Week's Poker on TV

Date: Thu, May 22, 2008

Next week's WPT episode is the Gulf Coast Poker Championship. The TV table features two well-known players, Bill Edler and "Captain" Tom Franklin, as well as John Davidson, David Robbins, Tim Frazin, and Hank Sitton (preview).

Also note the Eastern Poker Tour if you're in New England. The Poker After Dark and National Heads-Up Poker Championship seasons are over.

I reconsidered my recent review of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship after watching the last week, docking it 1/2 star for being boring.

Check our poker on TV schedule for the list of shows regularly running new episodes, sign up for our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our feed, and contact me with any suggestions or corrections.

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I Bet You Will Have a Season Three

Date: Thu, May 22, 2008

From the I Bet You MySpace page:

We're going to start filming another 13 episodes in August. Probably would start airing next early Spring.

Apparently DVDs for Season 1 will be available on June 10th. I'm guessing you can buy them at www.mojohd.com, among other places. I'll post a link once they become available. There's "supposed" to be extra footage on the DVD, including the infamous paintball massacre.

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2008 Aussie Millions Review

Date: Wed, May 21, 2008

** The Aussie Millions has a serious case of ESPN-itis. I counted the segments for half of a middle episode this year: they showed 5 hands, 6 bleeding chunks (where they flit around the room to show the end of big hands), and 6 non-poker segments. On an hourly basis that's 10, 12, and 12, which is pretty close to ESPN's low water mark: the first episode of the 2007 Main Event had 8 hands, 11 bleeding chunks, and 16 non-poker segments. The non-poker segments here are generally better than ESPN's, however (except for the recurring Down Under Dictionary, which is neither about poker nor the players). I wouldn't mind the occasional capsule bio of a player, but the closest most shows come to that is anecdotal human-interest stories. The flitting, on the other hand, has no redeeming virtue: please just show me more hands at the featured table.

Showing us pictures of players folding preflop, without showing us their hole cards, is ridiculous. Are preflop decisions unimportant? Why do I keep on seeing shows that don't show all the hole cards? That is about as basic an error as one can make when producing a poker show.

Conveying the action is another basic that too many shows don't get right. This show is a mixed bad there: normally I'd say that the lack of onscreen graphics showing the action is unacceptable, but competent play-by-play by Barry Tompkins alleviates much of the problem. He's paired with analyst Michael Konik. Konik has a lot of detractors, but I'm not among them. I think he does a workmanlike, real, and honest job. I wouldn't put him in the top class of analysts, but I'd put him above Nejad and Van Patten, and in about the same league as Mike Sexton. Overall, I think the announcing team is pretty good.

One nice feature of this show is the periodic graphics showing the chip leaders, average stack, and number of players remaining. They need to add the blinds and antes, however, for us to make sense of the chip stack information. Like most shows, the onscreen graphics don't stay up long enough for us to absorb them. Another flaw they have in common with most shows is that they don't show the players' positions.

There are a few oddities about this tournament that I don't like. The featured table is physically removed from the rest of the tournament. They showed one of the players at the featured table asking if the bubble had burst yet, something he would have known if he'd been on the casino floor with the rest of the players. Also, handedness changes twice in this tournament: at 36 players they move to six-handed tables, they they go to eight-handed for the final table.

The main problem with this show is that they don't follow the story of the featured table, instead flitting around the casino to show the ends of big hands or non-poker segments. At least I wasn't bored with this show, however, which puts it above recent shows like the National Heads-Up Poker Championship and the WSOP Europe. I considered ratings in the ** (below average) to *** (average) range for this show. I won't reward a show this badly made with an average rating, however, so it gets **.

See also the review of last year's show.

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Interview With Norman Chad

Date: Wed, May 21, 2008

Norman Chad was the guest for the May 15th On The DL podcast. They talk about poker for the first 21 minutes, and it makes an interesting listen.

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Mori Eskandani Talks About High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark

Date: Tue, May 20, 2008

POKER PROductions's Mori Eskandani is a guest on the current Two Plus Two Pokercast, from 1:46 - 1:58. He says that they've been approached by several companies interested in producing cash games, and talks about the upcoming season of Poker After Dark. There isn't much new information there. See our recent articles, and their comments, for the latest information on High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark (1,2).

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For New Englanders: Eastern Poker Tour

Date: Sun, May 18, 2008

Eastern Poker Tour shows the final table of a free bar poker league's major tournament, with the winner getting a WSOP Main Event seat. The first of two half-hour episodes already aired on Comcast SportsNet New England (the regional Fox Sports affiliate) and will reair at 1:30 AM Friday. The second episode airs Saturday night at 9:30 PM. Production values are low, but the commentary, by Bernard Lee and Spiro Mitrokostas, is pretty good.

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Next Week's Poker on TV

Date: Fri, May 16, 2008

Next week's WPT episode is the Turks and Caicos Poker Classic (preview) featuring Nam Le, Erik Cajelais, Alan Sass, Chris Smith, Trevor Hebert, and Rhynie Campbell.

Next week's Poker After Dark features six poker commentators: Howard Lederer, Phil Gordon, Chad Brown, Robert Williamson, Mark Gregorich, and Ali Nejad. Check NBC's site as the week approaches for a preview article and player bios. It's the last PAD of the season, but next season is only a couple of months away.

WSOP Live is airing the WSOP Circuit event from Harrah's New Orleans on Wednesday.

Sunday's three hours of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship takes it from four players down to a champion.

I regularly add additional information or updates to posts in the comments (hint: you can receive comments on a post via email if you have a Google account). Some posts with interesting comments this week include Will High Stakes Poker Return To TV? (no) and World Poker Tour Seeking a New Hostess (Layla declined to return).

Check our poker on TV schedule for the list of shows regularly running new episodes, sign up for our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our feed, and contact me with any suggestions or corrections.

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