|
Remember the first time you saw poker on TV? Maybe at a friend’s house; maybe at a bar with no sound. Maybe even at home late one night, somewhere in between a bowl of Cheerios and a hookah packed with West Afghani hash. Or maybe, like many who discovered poker on television long before the “boom” between 2002-03, you were just casually fl ipping through the channels one evening in the 1990s — looking for something to put you to sleep — when you found yourself on ESPN and suddenly flashes of grainy video in poorly-lit casinos, coupled with awkward commentary began to fill the room.
“What is this?” you say. “Gambling on television? With a buncha sweaty, old men playing cards? Oh, yeah, I’m gonna be out like a light in no time.”
But as you began to tune out, something strange happened… you actually began to tune in.
“When ESPN launched ESPN Classic, they found that some of the things that got the highest ratings — no matter what time they put it on — were these old poker tournaments, most of them random events they’d filmed during the years,” says ESPN poker announcer Norman Chad, one of the most recognizable voices and faces of television poker since the boom. “Yet, here these shows were: poorly produced; no enthusiasm; some commentary, but not much; and you couldn’t hear the players or even see the hole cards! I mean, it was nothing like what it is today. But for some reason, people ate it up.”
That they did.
But while ESPN deserves some credit for its introduction of the first poker shows in the U.S., and for keeping it alive and well with the World Series of Poker and other tournaments around the world these days, the game’s transition into pop culture – in the broader picture – can only be attributed on a small scale to the network giant.
What about Steve Lipscomb? You know, CEO and founder of the World Poker Tour.
Bet you didn’t know he did a documentary for the Discovery Channel about poker on television in 1998, long before his master plan to broadcast the game into millions of living rooms around the world was shot down time and again.
“I was just a guy with a flip chart back then,” says Lipscomb, adding that just because ESPN’s ratings might’ve showed that people were watching poker back then, the network still never had any interest in taking it mainstream or giving it a time slot other than in between a rerun of Arli$$ and Cheap Seats. “Of course, back then, no one was. I mean, if I was in your offi ce telling you that by Season 5 (of the WPT), we’d have 83 poker-made millionaires and prize pools of over $300 million… I believe you would have kicked me out.”
But as long as we’re passing out thank yous for poker’s evolution on television, we must credit the “Godfather” of how the poker we all watch and enjoy today became possible: Henry Orenstein, WSOP bracelet winner, producer of High Stakes Poker on GSN and, most importantly, inventor of the hole-card cam.
“Without Henry’s invention, none of how we see poker on TV today would be possible,” says John Miller, executive vice president of NBC Sports, the first major television network to broadcast poker after cable’s Travel Channel, FSN, GSN, and ESPN began saturating the air waves with poker around 2003. “True, a lot of things had to come together to make poker on television the phenomenon it is today, but without Orenstein’s invention, all you really have is chess – on TV.”
Of course, to make the poker shows appealing and have staying power, there is one thing every poker exec will agree on: If you were gonna put it on TV and make it enjoyable to watch, it had to be done right.
“If it’s produced well, played well, and gives the viewers something they want to stick with each week, televised poker is here to stay,” says GSN executive president of programming Kevin Belinkoff, who saw poker as such a strong part of the gaming world that it was a no-brainer to begin developing shows as soon as the network made the switch from the name Game Show Network to GSN. “I mean, look at what’s happened since the poker boom five, six years ago. Not a lot of those shows that tried to get (into the game) are still around. And the ones that are have set standards of success that prove to work. It’s no secret we looked at the popular poker shows when we went to develop ours and found what worked and what didn’t.”
After all, as Lipscomb puts it, “Once something gets popular, like a Survivor, a hundred other shows like Survivor pop up. But in the end when the boom levels off for that type of show, there’s really only one Survivor and a few other ones that followed the lead or found a way to be unique or different in their approach. And I think that’s where we’re at now.”
And because those failed shows flooded the market and viewers — with not only bad presentation of poker but really bad poker play — it’s no wonder few are still standing strong today.
Remember after the anomaly of Celebrity Poker Showdown wore off, and you began realizing that Phil Gordon really was on the verge of coming out of that booth and slapping Scott Stapp for folding out of turn yet again? Or what about when a buncha crumb-bums from Boston battled some shoe clerks from New York in the Boston vs. New York Poker Challenge? Or for that matter, just pick any episode of Hip-Hop Hold’em.
Thanks to the boom in 2003, the list goes on.
And this, of course, is where we give a small amount of credit to a guy named Chris Moneymaker, who not only came out of nowhere, turning $40 into $2.5 million and poker immortality, but brought with him a last name that went down in history.
“No matter who else comes along — and I don’t care what anyone else says,” begins infamous poker pro Phil Hellmuth, “I still say (Chris) has the all-time greatest name in poker history.”
That’s pretty hard to argue, Phil.
From infomercial buffer to big-time business
Debate away about the foundation of the poker boom, but when looking at the facts, one has to start with the poker show that truly left the first lasting impression.
The World Poker Tour has been a mainstay every Wednesday night in prime time on the Travel Channel since March of 2003 and has run longer than any other poker show. Not only was the WPT the first in the U.S. to display Orenstein’s invention of the hole-card cam, but it also tapped into something else Lipscomb says was crucial to making televised poker a success.
“For the Travel Channel not only to agree to put (poker on TV) as a series (in 2003), but to give it a time slot — and primetime at that — once a week for two hours was huge... It changed the way we saw the game,” says Lipscomb, who pitched the idea to networks far and wide in 2000, only to be told the same thing over and over: “Poker’s been on TV for 20 years and it’s had no real impact. So… uh… what else ya got?”
What Lipscomb had was a desire to see the game he loved on television — no matter the cost. So in 2001, he wrote a 26-page, single-spaced business plan for a televised poker tour that included a series of highstakes tournaments at casinos around the world. Sure, these tournaments already existed without cameras or lights; the only problem was they were averaging around 50 players to a field before the WPT came along.
Lipscomb pushed the envelope — and it worked.
“Would the poker boom have happened anyway? Absolutely not,” Lipscomb says. “Right before the WPT, and before Chris Moneymaker and before ESPN started covering the WSOP and the boom and all that, there were articles being written about how poker rooms everywhere were closing because the casinos weren’t making any money on them. In fact, every time a Harrah’s Casino would acquire a new place, the fi rst order of business was to close the poker room. I mean, three years before Moneymaker won it, you had a guy named Chris “Jesus” Ferguson who won it all. Come on! The guy’s nickname was Jesus and nothing became of poker when that happened?
“Without TV and the way it’s being presented now, the boom never happens.”
When the Travel Channel agreed to televise the first season of the WPT, interest grew.
In the tour’s first campaign, eleven tournaments made it to TV, with the first debuting from Foxwoods Resort in March 2003. There ended up being a total Season 1 prize pool of $13 million — and you don’t get $13 million in prize money with only 50 people showing up.
Sure, people like to poke fun at Lipscomb for bragging he generated the poker boom, but the truth is... the numbers are hard to ignore.
Filming a poker show and making it fun to watch are two different things, and Lipscomb called the eight-month editing process for the first broadcast “a nightmare.”
“I’ve got to be honest: As we neared the day of the first show, I still wasn’t sure how we were going to be able to edit this thing to make this interesting,” he admits.
But when it hit the air, the world tuned in immediately. Shortly after it debuted in March of ’03, Lipscomb claims ESPN jetted to Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, where he said The Worldwide Leader in Sports simply “copied” what the WPT had already done.
“Our ratings were through the roof and, as soon as it aired, ESPN took notice, handed over the tapes of our show to their producers, and told them to do exactly what we did,” he says. “Of course, you can never undervalue the fact that they were there and did a great job presenting it the year a guy named Moneymaker won it all. It really put poker in the spotlight.”
So while the WPT televised a series of international poker tournaments, ESPN swooped in and put together a poker production that had more of a “Super Bowl feel to it,” says Lipscomb, tapping into a corner of the poker market that would have fans on the edge of their seats from July to September each year when the network released its coverage of that year’s WSOP.
“You had WPT in the spring and fall, and WSOP in the summer,” Lipscomb says. “Poker was covered.”
The credit on ESPN’s side goes to former exec Fred Christensen and current WSOP producers Matt Maranz and Dave Schwartz, who head 441 Productions, a freelance firm that handles all of the network’s poker coverage. While the duo of Maranz and Schwartz flies below the radar when it comes to public recognition (they actually were not permitted by ESPN to discuss the show for this article), they proceeded to make an invaluable contribution to the game that — like all successful poker shows — soon began to have a cult-like following, even with a skeptic or two calling the action from the get-go.
“I think Norman and I both were a little skeptical,” says play-by-play ESPN announcer Lon McEachern. “I’d been calling offbeat sports for ESPN since the early 1990s and during the first year when I told people what I was doing, all I heard is, ‘What? You call poker on TV?’ and then after the show debuted, all I heard was ‘Wow! You call poker on TV!’”
Chad, meanwhile, says the moment of reckoning came when he finished watching the first episode in a screening room before it aired.
“The new producers of the show, Matt and Dave, had given poker play and its cast of characters such a real-life, gritty, old-school gambling feeling,” Chad says. “I looked at the other shows that were out at the time and some of the ones that came out later and, in comparison to how ESPN produces the show, I really think handsdown they do it better than anybody. And while I like High Stakes Poker and it is the one poker show I consistently make sure I watch, all the rest out there kind of just seemed like game shows.”
And while the Game Show Network didn’t take long to get into the poker game after ESPN and the Travel Channel struck gold, its impact — as well as NBC’s — has been as great as any.
Only the strong survive
Whoever had the greatest impact on poker’s initial boom, there’s no denying the number of shows that have tried their damnedest to capitalize on the success.
Unfortunately, many of them only proved one thing to be ultimately true about the television poker market: As fascinated as people were with playing the game — and it’s the same reason professional sports is a billion-dollar-a year-industry — if they’re going to watch someone else play it, they don’t want to see some guy they could smash at their home game; they wanted to watch the best.
“Where did some of the other ones go wrong? That’s easy: Too much talking by the announcers and not enough listening to what the good players are saying,” says NBC’s Miller, who was the creative force behind Poker After Dark — currently the No. 1 rated poker show, according to recent Nielsen Ratings — and the National Heads-Up Championship, both of which debuted in 2005. “While the Heads-Up Championship is unique in its own right for poker because it incorporates the NCAA Tournament and its 65-team bracket-style approach, what we wanted to do when we came up with Poker After Dark was basically just model it after IFC’s (hit show) Dinner for Five, in an intimate setting, since one of the reasons people watch it is for the conversations between those who are there.”
Lipscomb says at one time he counted between 15 and 20 poker shows on the air and the list is easily that extensive.
“Watching bad poker (play) sucks. It’s just that simple,” Lipscomb says of some of the shows — without naming names — that have come and gone. “The production is poor, the announcers get way too excited for no reason and that kind of stuff drives you nuts. When we do a show, it’s like playing music: Every note hits stem to stern.”
“John Miller and NBC deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve done,” says Lipscomb, who actually teamed up with Miller for a live televised poker tournament: FSN Poker Superstars Tournament of Champions, which ran head-to-head with the Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, producing stellar ratings. “The National Heads-Up Championship was something so unique because heads-up is a different game, a different style, and they had great production to turn that show into a hit.”
And if you didn’t believe it before, believe it now: NBC just renewed the shows through 2009, and Miller says that the “late night” time slot for Poker After Dark (2am) actually draws higher ratings than shows slotted in prime time on the other networks — including NBC.
Speaking of hits, the show rated No. 1 in nearly every fan poll on the Internet and in the heart of most professional poker players is GSN’s High Stakes Poker — a program that poker pro Daniel Negreanu once called “the best poker show on television, because it’s poker in its truest, rawest form: guys who put up their own cash and show the whole world how they make their living.”
Friend and fellow poker pro John Juanda agrees.
“I’ve been on all the shows, and the one I like the most is High Stakes Poker,” Juanda said during a February 2006 interview with BLUFF. “I hardly ever watch poker on TV,
but I do watch High Stakes Poker.”
The first season of High Stakes Poker, taped at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, brought in poker’s biggest names and began broadcasting in January 2006 with 13 episodes. The second season, taped at the Palms and consisting of 16 episodes, premiered later that year in June. The third season, consisting of 13 episodes, was taped at the South Point Hotel & Casino and premiered the dawn of the next year in January. And near the end of 2007, Season 4 debuted — repeating at the same hotel (the South Point) for the first time in the show’s history. However, the most recent set of shows were unique from previous High Stakes Poker seasons because the later episodes featured a $500,000 minimum buy-in (compared to the regular $100,000 minimum) game that saw over $5 million in play on the table at one time.
And amazingly, in just two years, High Stakes Poker now is one the network’s highest-rated shows.
“It’s always up there (in the ratings),” says GSN’s Belinkoff, who credits much of the network’s success to the fact they found a different niche that appeals to television viewers. “It was clear when we started developing High Stakes Poker that the WPT and WSOP already had the tournament scene covered — and do a great job of it — so we had to do something different, which is how the idea for the televised cash game came up. We felt that idea was every bit as interesting as the shows already on TV, if not more so. You had huge stakes, poker at its highest level, and our show gave you the ability of following a developing storyline from week to week, whereas the others crowned a champion and everyone went home at the end of every episode.”
Belinkoff adds: “It’s become kind of this honor in the poker world to make it onto High Stakes Poker and, these days, we actually have to turn players away.”
Of course, with the recent announcement that the WPT is leaving the Travel Channel (the network wants to go in a different direction altogether with its programming) and heading to GSN next season, the former Game Show Network is about to be the new, dominant source for poker on TV outside of a few months a year when ESPN begins its WSOP telecasts – also some of the highest-rated programming on the sports network.
“Landing the WPT, it now gives GSN two of the three jewels in the poker landscape,” Belinkoff says. “Yet, here we have two entirely different shows, two entirely different approaches, and two entirely different feels. And we have no doubt both will continue to have success, if not more, now that they’re together.”
As for those that didn’t make it, Miller agrees that networks left and right are jumping on the poker bandwagon, but says that in the end, the good, bad, and ugly sort themselves out.
“I think it’s definitely leveling off right now. It got too saturated for a while and it seemed like you could turn on the TV anytime of the day and find poker. But at NBC, as long as the advertisers stay happy — and they are — and the ratings continue to support it, poker will continue to be here.”
TV poker will prevail.
The amount of poker of TV may have tapered off, but the amount of good poker being played by good players – and the fans who religiously follow those players – continues to be strong.
There are even websites devoted solely to serving as a poker TV guide (pokerlistings.com, pokertv.com and pokertvguide.com) to let fans know exactly when their favorite shows — new or reruns — are airing.
And why not? After all, the TV poker phenomenon isn’t just something that resulted from the poker boom – it truly has become one of the contributing factors.
So where does it go from here? And is there a decline in sight?
“I think what all these producers found who’ve done it the right way is that ‘Hey, we were sitting on a gold mine the entire time,’” says Norman Chad. “Plus, the shelf life of
TV poker is unlike anything networks show on reruns. Take ESPN Classic, for example:
Sure, they can show a great basketball game again and again, but once you’ve seen it, you’re like, ‘Ehhh ...’ Poker, meanwhile… well, people watch those shows over and over. Don’t ask me to explain it — but they can’t get enough!”
Still, the viewers and advertisers are what drive any television genre, and there’s always a chance interest might wane… right?
“Well, it’s certainly not going anywhere anytime soon,” Bellinkoff says. “The WPT brand alone is something that has become so strong and such a prestigious thing to be attached to, and High Stakes Poker has really planted a flag on GSN. It’s obvious the WSOP (on ESPN) isn’t going anywhere and, while some of the fl y-by-nighters have come and gone, it’s been proven the good ones are here to stay.”
|
