ESPN Knows Poker

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With the April 15th indictment of the big online poker rooms like Full Tilt Poker, Poker Stars, and Absolute Poker, there was a major concern that the 2011 World Series of Poker would take a dip in terms of it’s entrants, as well as it’s fans watching.  This turned out to not be the case at all, on either fronts.

The 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event drew in a crowd of 6,865 players, and had an incredible number of fans watching the live action daily, all the way down to the November Nine.  There were 10 programs for the Main Event that aired on ESPN2, and had around 415,000 people watching each episode.  To top that off though, the primetime coverage of the event drew in 646,000 viewers, and there was also the live action streamed on ESPN3 online daily as well.

According to the senior director of programming and acquisitions of ESPN, Doug White, the show also did incredibly well in the early morning hours of 1am to 5am, boosting numbers around 136% overall.  Another great addition to the show was the professional poker player guest commentators, such as Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, Olivier Busquet, and Johnny Chan.  One of these players was constantly there to give analysis, predictions, and opinions on how hands were played, and how they would have played them.

The Main Event was even discussed on the biggest show on ESPN, Sports Center.  It’s incredibly impressive that after all that the United States has been through in terms of the ups and downs of online poker, that they were able to bring in not only the large number of players; but also the large number of fans as well.  While the future of online poker is still up in the air, one thing that seems to not be is the big time events like the World Series of Poker.  The 2011 World Series even broke records for largest total prize pool, as well as most entrants across all of the events.