My idea to promote lasting interest in televised poker

[Apathy]

I think televised poker could become so much more interesting if it was turned more obviously into a "season" or year.

Every event shown could acknowledge the existence of a refined or brand new Player of the Year type system and a few minutes of each broadcast could go towards explaning who at the final table was in the running, who the current leaders were and what kind of point were at stake.

For this to be meaningful there would have to be some kind of prize for placing well at the finish besides pride (this is poker after all). I would like to entertain ideas on what kind of prize would be good. Cash for top 5 maybe? How much? Maybe a big freeroll for the top 100 with weighted chip counts depending where you finished with a lot of money on the line?

I think the best example in real sport that this would relate to is the NASCAR standings, all events would be seperate but tied to an overall leaderboard race that everyone is gunning for. Winning any event is great, but its all about winning the whole thing.

This would give the shows opportunity to show the stars briefly on each episode even when they dont do well and would easily create room for new stars to come up and I think would generate a ton of interest from viewers who now wouldnt want to miss an episode.

The one major problem with this is it would need some sort of deal or agreement between the major tournament circuits to make it happen. I consider those to be the WPT, EPT, and WSOP, but I may be missing some.

So what does everyone think? criticisms? thoughts? comments? questions?