What a difference a few years makes. Rewind to 2000 and you’d have to search the dial far and wide for even a mention of poker on television. Now even basic cable subscribers generally have some poker programming option during most of the broadcast day, with new entrants to the genre appearing daily (or frequently enough that it seems that way some days).
Now that we as poker players have the option to be discriminating viewers, we’ll engage in a brief, totally subjective and absolutely arguable list of the best poker programming of all time. We’ve kept it to our top three and thrown in a little bit where we examine the uglier side of the poker programming coin.
THE THIRD BEST POKER SHOW OF ALL TIME
2 Months, 2 Million
Yes, there were a ton of flaws. Yes, it was confusing that the title of the show was 2 Months, 2 Million but the abbreviation for the show was 2M2MM. Yes, the goal of the show was a little arbitrary and became a bit of a narrative footnote as the show progressed. All of that said, 2M2MM deserves a spot on this list if for no other reason than offering the public at large (or at least the small slice of it that watches G4) a snapshot of life as a high stakes online poker player and documenting that life at a point in time that’s pretty unique in terms of the life-cycle of the online poker phenomenon.
Brian Roberts provided plenty of comic relief and Dani Stern provided attentive viewers with a shockingly honest view into how frustrating and mentally draining the grind of poker can be. Without ever coming out and hitting you over the head with it, the show offered insights into some of the most idiosyncratic aspects of poker – how it destroys your sense of the value of a dollar, how it ultimately stymies your social life and how, despite the fact that you can develop and refine your game with a group of friends, poker is ultimately a starkly individual pursuit.
THE SECOND BEST POKER SHOW OF ALL TIME
World Series of Poker on ESPN
While the World Poker Tour may have introduced a lot of players in the US to poker, the WSOP likely sealed the deal for the interest of the casual player. ESPN had been running coverage of the WSOP for several years pre-Moneymaker (before then, the tournament had been broadcast by a variety of outlets, including ABC’s Wide World of Sports back in the late 70′s-early 80′s) but it wasn’t until the poker boom in the US that they reshaped the program into a poker powerhouse that has done more to shape the careers of professional players (and inspire the careers of countless amateurs) than any other single force in poker.
You could talk all day about how ESPN has legitimized poker, but that wouldn’t do much for viewers if the show didn’t deliver. It does, accomplishing what can only be described as a Herculean task by distilling some 6 weeks of tournament poker into a few dozen hours of compelling television. ESPN delivers storylines in a way that no other poker programming even really attempts, plucking a few characters out of the thousands at the Rio and using them as emotional reference points for viewers who might quickly turn the dial on a raw feed of poker hands being played (no matter how high the caliber of play involved).
ESPN also scores major points for a willingness to innovate. Like it or hate it, the creation of the November Nine format (essentially driven by ESPN) has elevated the cultural status of poker and created what has to be the most dramatic few hours of poker on television a year with the episode of the WSOP that covers Main Event final table play.
So if that’s the case, why isn’t ESPN’s WSOP coverage the best poker show of all time? We’ll get to that in a second. However, it seems fitting at this point to insert a bit of perspective, to remind ourselves that while poker can produce content of genuine quality, it can also produce some real piles of hot garbage with equal – ok, greater – ease. To that end, we present…
THE WORST POKER SHOW OF ALL TIME
There have been plenty of doozies in the poker genre over the years. Remember the Professional Poker Tour? That was pretty weak, as were / are any number of similar shows focusing on some relatively obscure tournament that generally can be found filling time on some Fox Regional Sports channel. The Euro-versions of these shows aren’t much better, made up of the same generic format and presentation that strips just about every ounce of uniqueness and personality out of the game. The short rash of gimmick-based shows (extreme poker, poker hooked up to heart rate monitors, etc) also produced some serious contenders for this dubious distinction, but as bad as they were, it’s our opinion that no poker show has ever been as bad as …
…Face The Ace. This poker-meets-game-show-meets-blood-infection had an interesting enough premise: regular people face off against top poker pros and can press their luck after winning a match or bank the prize. It had star power: Ivey, Lindgren, Hansen. It had the promotional power of a major network and the second largest poker room online (Full Tilt Poker). It had the magic game show number: a $1 million potential prize.
What it didn’t have was anything approaching even the vaguest approximation of a hint of entertaining content. The hosting was stale, the banter between the regulars and the pros was stilted and terrible, the match progressions had no drama whatsoever – you name a thing that can be wrong with a television show and there’s a good chance it was (at least a little) wrong with Face The Ace.
Well, thankfully, that’s over. And rather than leave you with a terrible taste in your mouth-brain from thinking about Face The Ace, we’ll provide an antidote, a chaser if you will, in the form of …
THE BEST POKER TELEVISION SHOW EVER
High Stakes Poker
HSP is such a simple idea that it’s shocking it took producers such a long time to come up with it. Casual viewers tend to like two things about poker – the stars and the cash. HSP delivered both, and brought viewers serious poker played by serious people with serious bankrolls. They offered us a nice color team with Gabe Kaplan and AJ Benza (Benza won’t be around this season) that knew when to talk and when to let the play do the talking.
Most importantly, they offered an essentially unedited look at a poker game, flipping the ESPN model of coverage on its head. HSP dedicates an entire season to covering a cash game that lasts a couple of days and in doing so returns the absolutely essential element of context back into poker programming. That context allows viewers to witness not only first-level poker but also deeper confrontations that draw on the flow of the game and the history between players to produce excellent, compelling play. By doing so, HSP became a show that, for the first time, appealed simultaneously to recreational and serious players alike.
There’s also something about cash games that (apologies to MTT players) just feels more like real poker. World Poker Tour and ESPN’s WSOP coverage both produced a lot of drama, but much of it was (and continues to be) focused on pre-flop play. There’s plenty of skill in preflop play, but it’s much harder to communicate that skill on a TV broadcast. Cash game hands tend to play out over all streets, which adds a depth to the game (and a relatability) that televised tournament poker just can’t match. Tournament poker is all about the elimination, which is dramatic but often void of any real strategic content. By removing the elimination from the equation, HSP created a show that feels genuine, interesting and as close to a pumped-up version of the typical home game.
