Final Thoughts On The 2009 WSOP

This year I succeeded in avoiding the results of the WSOP Main Event final table until it aired (last year I tried and failed), but I had to go to great lengths to do so. Some others succeeded as well, but lots of others failed. Among the leading spoilers were Yahoo, PokerStars, and people who knew you were interested in poker. 2+2 and ESPN, on the other hand, were reportedly better about not spoiling it this year. Still, if ESPN wants to maximize ratings, I think they'll need to film the show on Monday for airing on Tuesday. This year they started filming it on Saturday, one day earlier than last year, which may be one reason the ratings declined this year.

There was one really awful editing choice on this year's broadcast: only showing a 90-million chip AA vs. KK pot from the point when the players were all in. I appreciate the move from two to two and a half hours this year, but I think three hours next year would be better. If they really want to do it right, however, they'll have a live stream on one of their secondary channels (like ESPN 2 or Classic) in addition to the edited broadcast. Plenty of people manage to watch all the "boring" hands on Poker After Dark each week (they show most of the hands played), so plenty of people would be willing to watch every hand of the WSOP too (even without the hole cards it's worth watching).

I recently editorialized about how ESPN should change their target audience from people who aren't interested in poker to poker fans. A look at the numbers makes that argument clearer. For comparison purposes, football's championship, the Super Bowl, gets about 40% of US households to tune in. The important fact about that is that it's clearly more than the number of football fans. Poker's world championship, the WSOP Main Event, on the other hand, doesn't even get nearly all the poker fans to tune in. How many poker fans are there? It's hard to say, but the following numbers will give us a ballpark range. 55 million Americans play poker. 15 million of them play real-money online poker and an indeterminate number of others play real-money live poker. Not all of them are going to be what I'd call "poker fans," however. Some smaller groups are mostly poker fans: the Poker Players Alliance alone has 1.2 million members and 2+2, the leading poker forum, had one million unique visitors last month. Plenty of poker fans and regular players have never heard of either of those, so it would appear that the number of poker fans lies somewhere between one million and the 15 million real-money online poker players. If just 1/3 of the real-money online poker players (or 9% of all poker players) are "poker fans," then we'd have five million poker fans in the US. The WSOP Main Event final table got 2.2 million viewers, and the average WSOP broadcast got 1.2 million. While football's championship event gets far more viewers than there are football fans, ESPN's broadcast of poker's world championship isn't even getting nearly all the poker fans to watch. If they aren't even getting the low-hanging fruit why do they think getting the non-fans to watch is the best strategy? Many of us poker fans just don't watch the WSOP any more (for example). Not only is ESPN losing the poker fans, they're also not converting the non-fans to fans because ESPN simply doesn't focus on the poker.

Regular readers will recall that ESPN/ABC plans to apply their poker broadcasting model to football in the future. I recently learned they've added another element to their plan. As you know, ESPN has been reducing the number of WSOP events they air every year. It was down to two of 57 events this year: the Main Event and one preliminary event. They do that because the preliminary events have lower ratings than the Main Event. They'll now be applying the same theory to football: in the pros they'll air only the Super Bowl and one playoff game; in college football they'll only air the national championship game and one regular-season game. I'm kidding of course, but it's another way to make clear how ESPN cuts their own throats by broadcasting hardly any of the world championship they have broadcast rights to. As I explained in ESPN's WSOP Monopoly Must End, they don't even have to broadcast the other events themselves: other cable networks would be glad to broadcast WSOP events, and could do so profitably with lower production costs than ESPN. ESPN's WSOP ratings would benefit from the broadcasts in the same way that regular season games contribute to the Super Bowl's ratings.

See also Michael Craig's interesting take on watching the final table live and how it can sometimes be better than edited poker on TV. 

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