Harrah's announced the
WSOP TV schedule. Only two WSOP events (
list of all 57) will be aired:
- Event 2, the $40,000-buyin 40th anniversary no-limit hold 'em event. This gets two hours.
- Event 57, the Main Event. This gets 26 hours, plus a one-hour final table preview show.
They'll also be airing two tournaments that will run in conjunction with the WSOP:
- The WSOP Champions Invitational. All past Main Event champions are invited to this freeroll.
- The Ante Up For Africa Celebrity-Charity Event.
Each of the above gets two hours of airtime.
The four-month break in the Main Event will continue, with play stopping on July 15 and resuming on November 7th. They'll play down to heads-up on the 7th, and the final heads-up battle will take place early on the 10th. It will air that evening. They're spreading the "November Nine" experience over one more day than last time this year, which will make it
even harder to avoid the results.
The TV schedule is getting generally bad reviews. People are disappointed that none of the mainstream bracelet events are being televised, and nothing but no-limit hold 'em is being televised, not even the $50,000 HORSE (see
last year's schedule for comparison).
I'd like to see other games as well, and will miss the star-packed final tables that they often produce. My primary concern is the quality of the broadcasts, however, and this schedule doesn't look good on that front. The vast majority of airtime is devoted to early and middle Main Event coverage, and ESPN hasn't done a good job of that in the past. They seem to focus on retaining bored channel surfers for a few more minutes rather than converting viewers into poker fans who'll return (
example). The Aussie Millions suffered from the same problem in the past, but
largely corrected it this year by only covering the final table. Alternatively, ESPN could cover one table at a time properly,
as the Professional Poker Tour did. Or they could even try a model that hasn't been tried before, but deserves a shot: following one player's progress through the tournament.
My biggest disappointment is that ESPN is only allocating two of the 33 hours of airtime to the final table of the most important event in poker. How do they justify finding the time for an invitational and a charity tournament while not finding enough time to do justice to the final table? The World Poker Tour does a decent job of showing a six-person TV table in two hours, but two hours isn't enough time to show a 9-person final table properly. Anyone who's watched the Main Event final table both live and on ESPN can tell you that the TV show
doesn't convey how it really went down. The Main Event final table deserves at least three hours, maybe four.
If they're going to find time for non-WSOP content, I suggest they at least make it interesting: air a cash game. The biggest cash games in the world will be taking place in Las Vegas during the WSOP, and many of those players would show up if ESPN chose to film one. Cash game are
overwhelmingly favored over tournaments by those that have watched both on TV. It's entirely possible that the current dominance of tournaments on TV will turn out to have been a historical accident (Steve Lipscomb choosing to film them instead of cash games at the beginning of the hole-card-cam era), and they'll return to their historically-obscure place in the poker world over time. I'd certainly be willing to bet that cash games will gain market share over time, and it seems to have started happening already. ESPN and Harrah's are experimenting left and right, so why not try the thing that's most obvious to me, but which they've missed so far?
The $40,000-buyin 40th anniversary tournament troubles me in that it seems to be the product of a TV-driven culture at the WSOP. I think of the event as the "new HORSE." The original $50,000 HORSE tournament was a TV producer's dream: the high buyin and mixed-games format produced a final table stacked with poker celebrities, but the final table was no-limit hold 'em for TV. They switched to running the final table as HORSE, as it should be, but apparently the ratings weren't good enough to air it any more. The $40,000-buyin 40th anniversary tournament seems like a custom-designed replacement for TV producers, but it's not the right thing for the WSOP (I'll tell you what is later in this paragraph). With all the flailing around ESPN and Harrah's are doing (I'm sure they'd call it experimentation), they might do better to keep in mind Grant Tinker's motto. He's known as "the man who saved NBC" for his remarkable achievement in the 80s (think Cosby Show and Hill Street Blues). Tinker said "First we will be best. Then we will be first." And that's exactly what happened. The problem with the WSOP is that they've lost sight of what it always was and is supposed to be: poker's world championship. It's slowly becoming more of a TV show, and just one of many poker leagues or tours, than a championship. Bracelet inflation is going on: with 61 handed out each year, they clearly don't signify championships any more, and they'll decline in value over time as their numbers increase. People can't even agree on what the true championship of the WSOP is anymore (there's debate as to whether it's the Main Event or the $50K HORSE). The WSOP needs to return to the clear, simple vision of what a championship is: there should be only one championship and bracelet for each game every year, and that tournament should have the highest buyin and best structure of any tournament playing that game that year. For the Main Event to maintain its position as the World Championship of Poker, that means a buyin of $50,000, approximately equal to the first WSOP after adjusting for inflation. If they do that there won't be any need for a $40,000-buyin TV special, which just further erodes the Main Event's position as poker's World Championship. They'll just have to televise the Main Event in a "first we will be best" manner, and they will be first.
See also:
WSOP Media Guide (PDF).
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