Posts Tagged ‘PokerStars Big Game’

High Stakes Poker Gone – Any Poker Shows Left?

Friday, December 9th, 2011

As you may already know, GSN announced that they won’t be bringing High Stakes Poker back for an eighth season. This ends the run of one of the most successful poker TV shows in history, and leaves us wondering if there’s anything left in the way of poker-related programming.

After all, this is the same year that also saw the highly-popular Poker After Dark fall by the wayside too. Both Poker After Dark and High Stakes Poker lasted seven seasons, and paved the way for other successful TV shows in the same genre.

Of course, there is ESPN’s coverage of the WSOP, which will probably always be on TV – at least for the foreseeable future; however, the WSOP isn’t a weekly program like HSP or Poker After Dark. Furthermore, there really aren’t any reoccurring poker TV shows on right now because several other ones have also been cancelled.

For instance, PokerStars Big Game was another 2011 casualty because PokerStars was busy pulling out of the US market and paying off the US Department of Justice after Black Friday. Speaking of Black Friday, it seems that this horrid day continues to have reverberations throughout the poker community – even eight months after the fact.

Following Black Friday, online poker is still in a recovery stage, and it will take something big to happen for anything to change quickly; that includes the world of poker TV shows. PokerStars would be the only sponsor capable of backing a major poker show any time soon, but they probably aren’t interested in jumping back into this world just yet. Both Party Poker and the iPoker network aren’t nearly big enough to fill the role that Full Tilt Poker did in the TV world (they single-handedly backed HSP at one point).

Long story short, it may be a while before we see any good poker TV shows that don’t include WSOP coverage.