High Stakes Poker Season 7 Tapes Wednesday Without FTP Pros

High Stakes Poker season 7 tapes from December 15-17 at a new venue, the Bellagio.

The PokerStars-sponsored show won't have any Full Tilt pros playing. Many of the best poker players in the world, including Phil Ivey, durrrr, and Patrik Antonius, are sponsored by Full Tilt. According to Barry Greenstein "Full Tilt players are invited to play and (producer Mori Eskandani) was disappointed that Full tilt is not letting them because pokerstars is sponsoring the show." He continues: "I talked to Howard Lederer (of Full Tilt Poker) and Mori.... Full Tilt has two major concerns. First is they don't like their players playing when PokerStars is the sponsor of the show.... Secondly, they were unhappy that PokerStars bought the HSP archives. In the early seasons of HSP, the players didn't wear logos, so FTP is concerned that viewers will be able to go to pokerstars.tv and see the FTP players without logos and be confused by their affiliation." Barry does see an upside in it however: "It's generally accepted that Phil (Ivey) and Tom ("durrrr" Dwan) are the two most popular players to watch from the standpoint of tough play. No doubt that they are both extremely good, and an edge they have on other good players is that they are easily rolled for the game and can win the aggression battles. As a result of this, we have had several good professionals decline to play at the last minute because they are intimidated. This shouldn't happen this year and we may even get some recreational players who think they have a chance to win. It may create better action."

This isn't a first: PokerStars pulled their sponsored players from Full Tilt-sponsored Poker After Dark two years ago. Until season 6 High Stakes Poker wasn't sponsored by an online poker room and didn't allow players to wear logos.

High Stakes Poker was almost canceled once, as it's a poor match for GSN's demographics. GSN's management changed, however, and last season ratings were up substantially over the previous season. GSN President David Goldhill said: "I think we’ve made a real commitment to poker. We’ve given it a full night on the network. High Stakes Poker, our original show, has had a terrific season from a ratings and demographic delivery point of view–up in every key demographic we measure. We’re very excited about how well poker has done on the network. However, we recognize that the poker audience is not exactly the same as the GSN audience for our game show programming. I think whereas a previous approach here would have been, “How do we get the GSN audience to more resemble the poker audience?,” our current approach is, rather than change the entire network to fit the profile of the poker audience, we’ve tried to make the rest of the network better at what it does for the audience that loves it, and keep poker somewhat separate."

See all of our High Stakes Poker season 7 articles. 

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