The reason why poker TV shows lack mainstream appeal

maybe , but i was watching some reuploads of million dollar cash, and they says the rules nearly every 10hands seen was very annoying,

The main reason for it to be popular on tv is
1. The game had characters back then, love em or hate , hellmuth, mike the mouth, sam farha, doyle, Jesus the cowboy, kid poker negreanu, Phil ivey, hansen, anontious, durr to name but a few, this made it enjoyable to watch even if you didn't know the rules to the game.
2. nowadays the characters are literally all the same, they either have face masks on,sunglasses,hoodies, and all take way too long to make decisions, its very boring to watch even for people who are into poker. Its like watching robots.

Those are very good points and probably much more relevant factors than my point. That being said I still want to see poker shows reintroduce explaining the rules in each episode at some point. I guess that was mainly for produced poker shows which it's mainly live streams now. I'm just an old man yelling at the wind at this point. Get off my lawn you whipper snappers!

In poker there was some competition back then which was, or had recently been, THE game, stud, draw, also LHE. Now NLH is more or less the game people view as poker. Voices would be heard repeating the rules isn't necessary. NLH descended from the legends to the people two decades ago.

Didn't most of the mainsstream marketing dry up? Also, unless something changed very recently isn't just about everything behind the poker go pay wall?

It’s a bunch of unattractive often unpleasant guys playing cards.

The WPT Championship was on at the bar last night and I changed the channel after ten minutes. ME FFS. ME!

Rather watch my old VHS tapes of the ‘93/94 Final Tables; they’re Apocalypse Now & Goodfellas in comparison.

And forget about resurrecting the golden age of Norm & Chad. That’s like searching for Cibola & Xanadu.

I balance out the mask by acting like a WWE wrestler

I got into poker after watching Late Night Poker with commentators Jesse May & Nic Szeremeta featuring players like Ram Vaswani, Joe Beevers, Liam Flood, Dave Ulliot, Peter Evans, Jac Arama and many more and they always explained the rules clearly.

Poker became more popular here in Ireland and the shows I watched were the Premier League series, WPT and WSOP. I think there was the poker million on Sky at one point which was a good watch. Players I enjoyed watching most were Tony G, Hellmuth, Annette Obrestad, Negreanu, Victoria Cohen, Ivey and Luke Schwartz to name a few and with some of those names drama was never far away. Commentary from Mike Sexton & Vince Van Patten was good TV. My favourites were the WPT and Premier League series just because they were very well produced.

Sadly the last channel that showed the odd episode of the WPT disappeared from here a few months ago. Not sure of the reasons for its decline but maybe some of it is behind a paywall.

The one and only problem with poker right now is that there isn't any coast to coast regulated online site that has been adapted by the masses who is just dump trucking ad dollars on TV/Internet.

Thats it.

The subject of the good ol' days of TV poker comes up on a regular basis, and I've yet to see a better explanation than this. It's why all those telecasts were on at all.

Also, having a bunch of uninteresting people saying uninteresting things isn't helpful.

Manufactured drama made for TV is just as bad. I'm guessing most of the people you see on these streams have really boring lives outside of poker which doesnt make for good viewing.

For starters it's 2025 not 2005. Outside of live events TV is dying.

Back then you had the dream to sell of any random person can win the main. That's dead.

Casinos and even the wsop main back then were filled with people who hadn't played hold em until a month or two earlier.

And as others have said today's best players are mostly robots who are boring as hell to watch play.

The market in is just so much more mature today. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Put it on ESPN today and it's totally different than 20 years ago. ESPN viewership is way down and way more people have been exposed to hold em already than were back then.

The only way to make poker tv mainstream popular is for it to be novel (that’s over), to aggregate big moments from several sessions into one episode, and/or to add non poker entertainment elements.

Poker is boring lol

I don't think it has anything to do with characters, what is or is not dying or if poker is boring or not. People want to get rich quickly, want to dream about a life with no boss, making millions playing a game. Find a way to manipulate their perceptions the way it happened with Moneymaker's victory, and poker and its shows might gain an appeal again.

It's just that the people responsible for the marketing, sites, casinos, whatever, are probably a bit too scared of governments I guess (?). Marketing for online poker as far as I can tell is nonexistent nowadays.

The NFL regular season would have pickleball ratings if it wasn’t for fantasy & gambling. And one day soon:

“I realized all I needed were the scorecards. I didn’t need the games.” -Robert Coover, ‘The Universal Baseball Association’ (1969)

You can’t make kids want to all meet down at the park after breakfast Saturday and play improvised games anymore.

You make a couple of good points in here.

If a theoretical 1 or 2 hour poker show showed the life of the 7 players @ the table away from the game providing they weren't robots or social ******s may be interesting to the non-pro player audience. Kind of like mtv cribs.

The only problem is: how do you make (nlhe) poker interesting to a non playing(/some1 with a v v casual interest in the game) TV watcher?

Like, how can you reproduce the equivalent of 2007 live hands with egregious mistakes made by players from a technical playing sense when i) a poker game isn't scripted ii) the top players don't make errors that are that obvious? You would assume their mistakes would be categorised as subtle or slight rather than glaring. And you would also assume (like in a comedy) the audience doesn't always want to work hard to find out what's going on, they sometimes want it spelt out for them as clear as day!

And i don't mean the basic rules of holdem!

So i guess my point is:

is there a structure that nlhe can be played in that is 'fun' for a broad audience?

is there a different variant of poker that can be shown that is exciting to a general audience?

if no, poker tv will continue to attract the same type and % of people it always did: the type of individual who has a mind that is attracted to poker (they see on tv).

A whole generation of fan boys got suckered by those early poker telecasts that were highly edited to show only the exciting hands. The fan boys thus thought that poker is so cool and exciting whereas the reality is that the great hands are few and far between and some of the main strengths a player needs are patience, endurance, and a leather ass.

Actually, if that VGL is doing OK, anything’s possible. Maybe Tamayo & The Laptops are onto something.

I can't imagine the current lineup of High Stakes Poker would bore anyone but the pay wall will prevent the public from seeing unless they work out some kind of deal with PokerGo and another tv network to air some episodes.

Different players used to have different styles which was more fun to watch. Now the best tournament players are the ones who best replicate solver outputs

I used to think this was the reason too but after watching this 2005 bracelet eveny on youtube im not so sure... most of the players are the same guys wed see today, that is wearing sunglasses and not saying much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQxxfJF...

I dont think we lack personalities, but I do think a previous poster was right about lacking "different play styles", today everything is GTO robotic and by the book.

I also think the editing and overall product was way better. Look at that show from 2005 , its better than anything today and its 20 years old . The hard truth is that poker was more mainstream back then and had more money to invest in production. A lot of the characters back in the day were manufactured and fake. If poker somehow magically became more mainstream again youd start to see more interesting "characters" again.

I'm thinking a poker player reality show would be great.

Imagine if a camera followed something like seven players for a year, and condensed their stories down to a series. You build up the characters then at the end there's a live-streamed million dollar game.

Like there's the rich playboy Dan Bilzerian type flying a helicopter out to a private island for a wild party. Then you've got a supermodel flying to photo shoots in Paris and dealing with body image issues. There's the degen guy making shady deals to scratch up his next buy-in. Then there's a guy meditating at a monastery with Buddhist monks and working on achieving enlightenment. Interspersed with their real life drama you have clips from their poker exploits also building drama with the financial implications.

At the end you have a massive sit-n-go where the winner takes all and the losers are left penniless (obviously exaggerating a bit). That would be awesome if it was done right and you wouldn't have to be a poker player to enjoy it.