[MrFizzbin]

[ QUOTE ]
Heads-Up poker still has its place on a widely-distributed TV network in the U.S. (i.e. a network that is looking for at least 1 million households and 1.2 million viewers per poker TV episode)

ESPN is scheduled to devote 2 hours to the first ever WSOP Heads-Up bracelet event in 2007: $5000 buy-in, with either 256 players or 512 players participating.

With Harrah's now running its own televised WSOP-branded Heads-Up bracelet event, does Harrah's still need to offer NBC Sports/HSOR/Poker PROductions the use of Caesar's Palace for NBC Heads-Up in 2008?

Also, with most of the online poker "school" ads gone, will NBC Sports be able to sell the rest of the ad inventory to "mainstream" advertisers, and at a reduced rate (because the ratings in 2007 are down 20% from 2006), to make holding the 2008 edition of the NBC Heads-Up event profitable enough to proceed?

These are serious questions.

We will get an answer soon enough from NBC Sports and Poker PROductions.

Until we get an answer, we can only speculate.

[/ QUOTE ]

Relative to other Televised sports productions poker is pretty low cost, the players provide the prize pool, the casino the venue, so the potential for profitability is fairly high.

The problem with heads up as its currently done is there is no Horatio Alger angle to the competition so you can't tell a story of rags to riches that the WSOP (and to a lesser extent) the WPT use in the course of their products. The field contains to many Nobodies/nobody cares names and they don't cover enough poker. Take last year, Ted Forrest/Sam Farha played for 3 hours (thats right 3 hours) how much of that epic battle made the air ? about 4 minutes/2 hands...
But thank god we got to see 15 minutes of Daniel and Evey watching evey donk off chips.

In a format like this you have to go technical and deep explain complex strategy. Explain different players styles, and approaches to heads up, and select a field of top On-line and B&M players as rated by one of the Poker sites (image the top B&M versus Top online players). TV poker spends too much time catering to the ignorant, rather that giving people credit for being smarter than they are. (In otherwords people know crap when they see it, and the ratings show) Maybe NBC could have the Detroit Redwings come to vegas and play heads up poker versus the Dallas Cowboys (I hear both those teams have a large following UGH) Less schtick/formula more real poker...

Olivert it would be interesting to see the web views of heads up versus web views of new Poker After Dark on NBC site to see how they compare.