ESPN executives are smart: they figured out that no one is interested in watching poker on TV. Their response was ingenious: target their "poker shows" at people who aren't interested in poker! I figured out their strategy when I counted the hands they showed on some of the WSOP episodes this year. For the first episode of the Main Event they showed 8 hands (down one from last year; two other WSOP episodes I watched showed about 11 hands). They spent more time than that showing bleeding chunks (hands where no preflop action is shown; there were 11 in the first episode of the Main Event). But ESPN devoted the largest number of segments to non-poker content (about 16 in the first episode of the Main Event). Ingenious: if no one is interested in watching poker on TV, then ESPN should target channel surfers! And what's the gold standard in veg-out TV, the caviar of channel surfing? Sitcom reruns of course! So ESPN found a couple of old sitcom stars, Ray Romano and Brad Garrett, and showed them yukking it up for a while. They also figured out that channel surfers are interested in old and blind people and provided a satisfying dose of each. And we're interested in watching people throw Frisbees! Send the cameras! But that's not the end of ESPN's genius: they figured out that Nielsen's People Meters were providing inaccurate demographic data! While ESPN had always thought that their audience was heavily skewed towards young men, they found that it was actually... moms! In the past ESPN might have focused on
Evelyn Ng and
Liz Lieu, who were at featured tables (the ones with hole card cams), but instead wise ESPN producers directed their cameramen to cover David Williams and Jamie Gold's moms, who they found at outer tables.
ESPN doesn't take poker seriously. In fact, their broadcasts are the antithesis of what a poker broadcast should be... making ESPN the Great Satan of Poker Broadcasters. I give ESPN's 2007 WSOP broadcasts 1 1/2 stars, only because they have some entertainment value and cover the most important events in poker.
I won't justify a show that doesn't take poker seriously with a serious review. Those of you who are interested, however, may find greater detail about the problems with ESPN's poker in some of these classic articles:
If I were to give ESPN some serious advice on its poker coverage, it would go something like this: cover one table well. That would be two hours per day of a major event, or two hours for the final table of one of the lesser events. Ignore everything else, like the other tables, people busting out, and non-poker content. Covering one table well means getting the basics right: things like showing entire hands with all the hole cards, position, and stack sizes.
ReplyDeleteFor the record: the two Main Event final table episodes showed 25 of the 205 hands played.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the HORSE broadcast:
ReplyDelete- I find things move too fast when they're covering games I don't play regularly, especially split-pot games.
- Putting the scoop percentages variously on the left or right of the cards is a bad choice that takes getting used to.