I’m a little troubled by the state of televised poker nowadays, because I assume that it is a bellwether for the prospects of poker in general . . . which means not good. Or, if you want to put it another way, the pendulum after the past several years is swinging back the other way from being too-popular to being not-as-popular.
Today on TV you can find High Stakes Poker and World Poker Tour on GSN; Poker After Dark and Heads-up Championship on NBC; the ubiquitous World Series franchise on ESPN; and that’s about it. A lot of shows we used to have are gone, such as Ultimate Poker Challenge; MansionPoker.Net PokerDome; Poker Superstars I, II and III; Celebrity Poker Showdown; Professional Poker Tour; and a whole bunch more. Granted, many of these are no big loss – Fox Sports’ Charlie Rose has the effect of fingernails-on-the-chalkboard on me, and The Phil Hellmuth Show – er, I mean, the final season of Celebrity Poker Showdown – was literally unwatchable.
But now I hear that GSN will be dropping their poker programs altogether, after four seasons of High Stakes Poker and only one season of World Poker Tour. I heard that the programming guy at GSN who bought those programs left, and his successor isn’t much of a poker fan. WPT might relocate to another network (they used to be on Travel Channel) – but maybe they won’t? Maybe this is the end of WPT? And it’s already too late to film another season of HSP for the coming year, as I understand. So we might lose two of our remaining shows.
Meanwhile, this year’s World Series of Poker is going to delay the final table four months, in part so that ESPN can build up the excitement for their program. Does this mean that there are even cracks in the WSOP Empire?
I’m not sure what all this means, or whether I’m just making a mountain from a molehill, but there may be something happening in the world of poker that isn’t terribly healthy.
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