Last Wednesday the World Poker Tour aired its final new episode on the Travel Channel. It was also the show’s 100
th episode. And it was also its biggest tournament ever, April’s WPT Championship at the Bellagio, with more prize money and a higher first place prize (almost $4 million) than any WPT tournament before it.
For Season XI, the WPT will move on to The Game Show Network, a somewhat obscure cable channel relegated to the mid-100s on my own digital cable box. The WPT helped popularize the modern jolt of televised poker. In fact, the WPT was the first American show with hole-card cameras, and the first to use the groundbreaking “lipstick camera” method which really projected the feeling of seeing the players’ cards and decisions through their own eyes.
Since its inception, the WPT has been my favorite televised poker program. Last week’s episode was a classic, with monstrous tension, entertaining characters, and life-changing prizes.
Unless you have the rare peculiarity such as Guy Laliberte, this week’s episode’s requisite entrepreneur extraordinaire (last week’s featured And1’s co-founder Seth Berger). In addition to the unique spectacular stories like Laliberte’s, you have the prototypical Old-School Non-Famous Pro, this week’s being Mike Wattel of Phoeniz, AZ. You have the Big Name Pro, in this case Carlos Mortensen. You have the Entertaining Weird Guy Pro, Kirk Morrison this episode. You have The Amateur, this week being Paul Lee. And you have the Veteran Asian Badass, Tim Phan
being the obvious fit here.
No other poker show is as adept at creating these sort of characters, and no other poker show sensationalizes the game as efficiently. The WPT is hosted by the best poker announcing duo in the business, Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten. No one provides better dichotomous analysis for experienced players and casual viewers than Sexton. The underrated VVP uses an entertain-at-all-costs approach that rarely disappoints.
I believe the WPT was one of the biggest reasons for poker’s explosion. I can honestly say it changed my life, and I’m sad to see it relegated to cable obscurity.
being the obvious fit here.
6 Comments:
The Game Show Network is just as obscure as The Travel Channel is; the only difference being that some cable packages don't offer the former with their basic setup. I think most people I know could name more GSN shows than TTC shows anyway. There is also now a coupling with High Stakes Poker, and the two together will likely help each other and the network out. Also, it's kind of weird that WPT was even on TTC to begin with. They don't talk about the places they tour, there are not circuit traveling tips, it's just poker. It makes more sense on a game channel anyway.
The closest thing to travel in the WPT shows was Shana walking in a bikini on the beach in the Bahamas. Now if this wasn't a moral-right-wing-insane-asylum of a country we might actually grow up and have a poker channel, like they do in Europe. But I guess GSN will do for now.
All I can say is that Norman Chad is much better than Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patton put together. I would love to see him do commentary and tell inside stories during NFL games, how good would it be to see him yelling out, "It's Jon Gruden . . . Jon Gruden!"
Dammit! Just what GSN needs is more fucking commercials - Even when it got down to Moon vs Spud in that $1 tourney we saw more hands per hour than you do on WPT. I'm pretty sure the "biggest" thing I learned from watching the show was that shana hiatt had some nice tits.
Although I must say I am glad to see this posted... anything to move that god awful karma=greed post down the ladder is a blessing.
I like how Mike and Vince always refer to tourneys by their full title, i.e. "The Bellagio Five Diamond World Poker Classic."
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