2007 Poky Awards: The Best of Poker on TV

Best Poker Show
Poker After Dark
Honorable Mention
World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table Live

Best Commentary
Phil Gordon

Hall of Fame
American Poker Championship

Special Award For Innovation
Poker Dome

Poker After Dark (review) wins the Poky for best show primarily because it shows most of the hands. It's the only show that allows you to see how the game is actually played, and for me it leads the pack in both entertainment and educational value.

The World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table Live (review) earns an Honorable Mention in the Best Show category. The only way you'll ever know what really happened at the Main Event final table is if you watch the live broadcast. Even with the hole cards, ESPN's limited selection of hands doesn't convey what really happened. Watching history being made live is an incredible experience, though, at 16 hours, it's not one I'm sure I'll repeat.

Phil Gordon repeats as Best Commentary winner primarily for his work on Pro-Am Poker Equalizer (review). His commentary on that show single-handedly transformed a bad made-for-TV format into a show that I could recommend. Phil should have a regular gig doing commentary on one of the major poker shows.

The American Poker Championship joins Lifetime Achievement Award winner Henry Orenstein in the Hall of Fame. The American Poker Championship (review) was the first live poker telecast. It showed every hand of the last four hours of a real tournament, with hole cards. The technology to show a live broadcast hadn't been perfected yet, but it was one of the most serious attempts ever to show poker as it should be shown on TV.

Poker Dome is the show that perfected that technology, earning it a Special Award For Innovation. The show was filmed live to tape, with hardware recognizing the cards and chips, and software creating onscreen graphics, in real time. The show also had notable non-technical strengths: it showed most of the hands, and it showed all the hole cards at the beginning of the hands (rather than as people acted). If you were to combine a real event like the American Poker Championship with Poker Dome's technology, you would have the perfect poker broadcast. That's the Holy Grail of poker broadcasting: installing Poker Dome's technology in casinos so that every hand of real poker games can be broadcast live. The shows would cost less to produce and be of higher quality.

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See also the 2006 Poky Awards.