NBC to air poker tourney at Golden Nugget

[clevfan]

Monday, February 14, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

GAMBLING: NBC to air poker tourney

Network's sports division plans to film event at Golden Nugget

By HOWARD STUTZ
GAMING WIRE



NBC Sports plans to announce today that it will produce its own Las Vegas-based poker tournament -- a move that could be a prelude toward landing the World Series of Poker on network television.

NBC will film the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, a showdown between 64 players at the Golden Nugget in early March, just the latest in a series of new television programs aimed at capitalizing on poker's growing popularity.

The event, which features a $1.5 million purse and will air on four consecutive Sundays in May from 9 a.m.-10 a.m. (noon to 1 p.m. on the East Coast), prior to the network's telecast of the Arena Football League. The tournament will conclude with a two-hour finale on May 22 from 10 a.m. to noon. (1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time).

Unlike other televised poker events, the format will be head-to-head competition with a single elimination. Players will pay a $20,000 buy-in and play no-limit Texas Hold 'em. The overall winner will receive $500,000.

"It's almost like an NCAA (basketball) tournament format where you have 64 players and get them down to one overall champion," said Jon Miller, senior vice president for NBC Sports. "The most dramatic phase of each game is when it comes down to the final two players. It's in these heads-up matches that top players play their opponent more than the cards with a lot of bluffing and table talk."

Miller said an NBC producer who has worked on NASCAR and the Olympics came up with the idea for a tournament.

"Poker has found a tremendous audience with a great following. One of our top producers who has worked on NASCAR and the Olympics came up with this idea," Miller said.

Miller said the event would be filmed March 4-6 and players would be seeded into groupings.

Miller said NBC looked at other venues around the country, but decided Las Vegas was the right location for the tournament, which will include a recognizable field of players, including poker legends Doyle Brunson, Howard Lederer and Johnny Chan, and the two most recent World Series of Poker champions, Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer.

"Las Vegas gives this event a tremendous amount of credibility," Miller said. "This is where a poker championship should be held."

Rob Dondero, executive vice president with R&R Partners, said the time slot for the broadcasts and their national scope could be worth $500,000 in exposure to both the Golden Nugget and Las Vegas for each telecast.

"They may get fairly decent ratings for an early Sunday morning time slot," Dondero said. "The Nugget will get exposure from having its name on the table felt and the cards and through some property shots."

Miller said invites had been sent to players and he expects the field to be filled quickly.

"Poker has been exploding in popularity the last couple of years," Brunson said in a statement. "The only thing missing was having a tournament on a network TV. As a player, I couldn't be happier."

NBC has had success with two televised poker events shown the last two years opposite the Super Bowl pregame coverage, Miller said. This year's event, the Poker Superstars Championship, scored a 2.2 rating opposite an National Basketball Association game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets, which had a 2.0 rating. Miller said the Las Vegas event will add to NBC's poker credentials.

With Harrah's Entertainment announcing in January that it had retained the former president of CBS Sports as a consultant to renegotiate its agreement with ESPN to televise the World Series of Poker, Miller said NBC might want to get in on the bidding.

"When we got the U.S. Open and our golf package, we had to show we knew how to do golf," Miller said. "With what we've accomplished so far with poker, the World Series of Poker is something we'd like to take a look at. Poker has found a tremendous audience with a great following."

Harrah's obtained the rights to the World Series of Poker last year when it purchased downtown Las Vegas' Binion's Horseshoe. It sold the downtown casino to MTR Gaming Group last year, but retained both the Horseshoe name and the World Series of Poker.

Harrah's plans to hold this year's event at the Rio beginning the first week of June. The no-limit Texas hold'em main event will be played in mid-July with the final two days, scheduled for July 14-15, taking place at Binion's for the final time.

[XXGameXX]

And People say if you watch sports you must have a bet on it.
At least you have some real sports fans and fantasy league followers who don't need to bet the sport



With POKER on television
Gambling has risen in numbers greatly . No one will Watch poker UNLESS u gamble on poker yourself.

With all this Poker on TV
POker will become bigger and bigger.

[clevfan]

February 14, 2005

NBC spot in the cards for poker tourney
By Liz Benston
LAS VEGAS SUN

Capitalizing on the popularity of poker and previous poker broadcasts on NBC, NBC Sports in May will air the first poker tournament to appear on a major television network.

The 2005 National Heads-Up Poker Championship, which is also the first poker tournament to be produced by a television network, will feature a $1.5 million purse and air on four consecutive Sundays beginning May 1 and concluding with a two-hour finale May 22. The tournament will take place at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

The invitation-only championship will include poker pros such as Doyle Brunson, Howard Lederer, Johnny Chan, 2003 World Series of Poker Champion Chris Moneymaker and last year's World Series of Poker champ Greg Raymer.

Unlike most other tournaments where the winners of each poker table gather for a run-off, players in NBC's tourney will play each other one-on-one. The event will start off with 64 players who will be paired off and eliminated over time, similar to the way the National Collegiate Athletic Association structures their tournaments, NBC officials said.

"This is a unique and exciting format" that lends itself well to television, NBC Sports Senior Vice President of Programming Jon Miller said.

The tournament stems from the success of previous one-time poker broadcasts on NBC around the past two National Football League Super Bowl games, Miller said.

In 2004, NBC aired a "Battle of the Champions" poker event featuring the best players in the World Poker Tour, but the new event will be the first multi-day, tournament-style event on a major network.

This month, the network aired the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament, an event pitting eight poker pros against one another at the Palms resort in Las Vegas. Each of the players bought in for $400,000 for a game of no-limit Texas Hold 'Em and a collective prize pool of $3.2 million. That event attracted 8.6 million viewers, Miller said.

The two events were the highest-rated poker shows of all time, he said.

Ratings were especially strong among men 18-34 and men 18-49, a "very difficult demographic to reach consistently," Miller said.

Budweiser has been tapped as the top sponsor of the event, which allows the beer distributor to feature its logo the felt poker table and elsewhere at the event, he said. Other sponsorships are still pending, he said. The cost of the sponsorship wasn't disclosed.

The tournament would compete with the World Series of Poker, a Las Vegas-based tournament owned by Harrah's Entertainment Inc. that airs on ESPN. It also would compete with the World Poker Tour, a worldwide series of poker tournaments broadcast on the Travel Channel.

Harrah's last month said it had retained the former president of CBS Sports as a consultant to renegotiate its agreement with ESPN to televise the historic poker tournament.

ESPN has aired the World Series of Poker, held at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, for the past seven years and has broadcast poker on television since 1994. Harrah's took of the tournament last year, the same year of record turnout for the event as well as ESPN's highest ratings for the tournament.

The World Series of Poker championship is an open event, with entrance allowed for anyone 21 or older with the $10,000 buy-in. Miller said poker pros have said the invitation-only, 64-person field of the National Heads-Up Poker Championship will include many of the world's top players.

Miller said NBC affiliates have welcomed the high-rated poker events and don't appear to be concerned about a potential backlash from states that have fought programming and advertising featuring gambling.

[Minnow]

Game, I don't think that is necessarily so.. my husband and daughter will watch and neither play the game, nor totally understand the strategies involved. (I doubt they would if I weren't home though.) They loved the tourney of champions and were rooting for Annie to beat the odds. Maybe it's the head trips and different personalities, or maybe it's the huge stacks of bils on the table that makes it almost a game show?