New Poker TV Show Caters to New Poker-watching Trends

Poker TV habits are changing, and people now prefer to watch unedited high stakes Poker. A new show called “UKIPT Champion of Champions” knows how to cater to this new audience, and its recent broadcast has been widely celebrated

Earlier this month the UKIPT Champion of Champions tournament took place where David Vamplew surprised everyone rising from relative obscurity to tournament champion. Another fascinating aspect of the tournament was the different style of televised poker; it seems that there are huge differences within the poker community as to which style of poker they watch on television. A number of players would prefer to watch High Stakes Poker rather than ESPN’s WSOP broadcast.

This is because a large amount of poker fans find the later stages of tournament poker, especially because of the way it is edited for television, extremely boring to watch. Whilst some people will find all-ins exciting to watch, the way the closing stages of a tournament are portrayed on television makes it seem like a nearly all luck standpoint and you can’t actually watch any plays.

By contrast, if you are watching High Stakes Poker in which you see the best players in the world buy in with large amounts of cash and play with deep stakes, you will see 4-bet bluffs, river check-raises, three street calldowns with bottom pair and many more exciting plays. All of which you will never get to see in a tournament.

However, the UKIPT Champion of Champions event seemed to be catering for both tastes. There were 250BB starting stacks and low blinds and despite the fact that there was rarely a turn or a river and a lot of non-showdown pots, the deep stacks and good structure made for good viewing. Then the event changed style, the blind levels were 30 minutes which meant two hours of deep stack poker before an hour of madness where stacks were sort and players were being knocked out every few minutes.

Maybe this could be a new compromise for televised poker, lots of deep play followed by rapid all-ins and quick elimination.