Poker’s time in the sun may have come and gone, if recent ratings are any indication

Steve Friess had an interesting editorial on Las Vegas Weekly. The highlights:

If there were ever a year when the World Series of Poker should have enjoyed a renewed boost, it was 2009. The stars had aligned in every conceivable way, and grandiose predictions seemed warranted.
“This is going to be the most-watched Final Table in history,” legend Phil Hellmuth predicted to me before it took place in two spurts on November 7 and 9.
And I believed him. It certainly made sense. Alas, he was wrong.
.... virtually nobody bothered to report the outcome that actually mattered. TV ratings for the two-hour Final Table broadcast on ESPN on November 10 were actually down from the 2008 broadcast. (Ed.: see our ratings article)
.... Skeptical journalists have long been taking note of poker’s relative weakness versus its white-hot years, 2003-2006, when poker TV shows were all the rage and Internet poker blossomed into one of the universe’s all-time most profitable enterprises. In 2006, when 8,773 players entered the World Series of Poker’s Main Event and the top prize hit $12 million, there seemed nothing that could slow the game’s stampede into the hearts and minds of American popular culture.
Poker overlords like to note that Congress put the kibosh on poker’s growth by passing a law in the fall of 2006 severely restricting the ability of most Americans to easily put money into their online poker accounts. This certainly is true and did result in a dramatic drop the following year in WSOP Main Event entrants. In fact, in the three years since, that figure has yet to top even 7,000.
That’s all well and good, but that does not explain the waning interest in watching poker on TV, and it is only via TV that tournament poker can become anything more than a peripheral part of mainstream American culture. Why would one’s inability to play online reduce one’s interest in following the pros? If poker wants to be compared to the big sports leagues, don’t they know that the vast majority of people who watch the NFL or NBA don’t actually play football or basketball? Most people watch sports to see other people do things they can’t do or can’t do that well.
The ratings stall is particularly stunning given the radical lengths to which the World Series of Poker and ESPN have gone to reverse a ratings decline that first became evident in 2006 and 2007. “Radical” is the only word that can describe the decision in 2008 to bifurcate this tournament, to play the bulk of it in July but pause play once the nine finalists emerge and wait until November to play out the rest.
This was a decision undertaken solely to increase TV viewership. 
.... The trouble now is, 2009 should have been a banner year for this event and its TV show. Network TV viewership is up, reflecting that Americans want to be entertained and distracted from the ponderous, endless health-care debate. And, as WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack rightly noted, the Final Table contenders this go-around were directly out of central casting.
.... this piece is about the limits of poker’s prominence, and a ratings stagnation, given these favorable conditions, gives us a sense of where those limits are.
.... the WSOP folks would be wise to stop predicting or striving for a resumption of the unnatural poker boom of the earlier part of this decade. That was a great run of luck, but it’s over now.

ESPN executives still talk about "mainstreaming" poker. But are there any ESPN viewers left who haven't seen poker yet? Believing that poker will go on growing indefinitely is a pipe dream... which means it's time for ESPN to start treating poker like it's a real sport (whether it is or not is irrelevant). The days of creating poker shows for people uninterested in poker, as has been done, should be over. That strategy has just minimized the number of converts and return viewers. What price a serious poker broadcast?

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