Top 10 Ways for ESPN to reclaim the magic of the WSOP Part 2 of 2
Watching the World Series of Poker coverage progress over the years (or perhaps regress, if you are of the same opinion as me) it seems to me that the telecast has grown incredibly stale since 2003 -when it was a groundbreaking poker program-and ESPN needs to consider mixing things up quite a bit if they want to recapture the magic of the 2003 WSOP Main Event.
So, with that in mind, here are the first five of 10 ways for ESPN to enhance its World Series of Poker coverage:
#6 - Less use of the hole-card cam.
As much as the hole-card cam revolutionized televised poker, at this point I feel it is being overused. Now would be a good time for the WSOP to only use the hole card cam during the Montages I suggested, and also at the end of the hand, not during. This would give the viewer the play along value, but also eliminate the pre-hole-card cam days when you never knew if your read was right or not. Imagine amateurs sitting around watching the WSOP yelling out, “HE’S BLUFFING”, or “HE HAS IT, look at his face!”
#7 - Pick-up hands in the middle of the action.
This goes along with my time saving Montages. In an effort to save time why not pick-up hands in mid action when things start to heat up? The announcers could quickly explain the situation, just like they do for the non-TV tables when a big hand goes down.
#8 - Live Heads-Up Play.
With the amount of information available on the Internet -you really can’t avoid it-delaying the broadcast of the final table is not much different than delaying it three months; you would literally have to not go online in the interim to avoid knowing the results. So with that in mind, why not just show heads-up play live? Heads-up play will generally go by very quickly, and if it gets dragged out past the two hours ESPN devotes to it just switch the coverage to ESPN2 or even streaming online.
#9 - Show the ‘Fun” side of poker.
What happened to “The Nuts” segments, and the fun-side of the game? ESPN has so many options, from crazy prop bets, to odd table behavior/talk; this is something the telecast has gotten away from in recent years.
#10 - Gut the Main Event coverage.
Do we really need 28 Main Event episodes? Is it important to know what happened on Day 1a, 1b, 1c, and 1d at an hour a piece? I’d love to see the lead-up to the final table take only 4-weeks (8 episodes). ESPN could replace the gutted Main Event episodes with action from other final tables -maybe in a montage format-showing the winners of all 57 Events.
