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Bill's Poker Blog
Blogging About Poker Since 2546 
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Thanks to the never-ending broadcasts of celebrity and professional poker tournaments, poker is now the third most-watched televised sport on cable TV—behind only car racing and football.
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About Bill’s Poker Blog Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
After Party Poker I spent two years living in Thailand and travelling around South East Asia. I'm currently working at the World Poker Tour in Irvine, Ca. working on exciting projects taking online poker to the next level. More about Bill Follow Me Around The WorldA semi-complete list of my travels |
Categories
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d like to see where they got their numbers from, if only to see what else qualifies as a “sport”. Cheerleading competitions? World’s Strongest Man?
Poker’s a game. That’s not a knock — poker tournaments certainly take an amazing amount of endurance, and I’ll chose to watch a good televised poker tournament over the best golf or NASCAR broadcast ever, every day of the week. But I just can’t get behind the redistricting of poker as a sport, when there’s so little physical dexterity involved.
(Of course, on the other side of the spectrum you’ve got judge-controlled exhibitions like ice skating and most of the X-Games, which require amazing amounts of physical dexterity but without objective goals — like, say, winning all the chips on the table or scoring the most runs or being the first to the finish line — can never be considered sports, either.)
The point is not whether it’s a sport or not, but how many people are watching it. They get their numbers from Neilsen type ratings and such, and use regional factors to apply it viewers across the whole country.
It sure beats watching men’s tennis or figure skating.
Note to the TV Execs: PLEASE stop the current trend of over-kill of poker programming. That or increase the quality of the programming.
I’d hate to see poker viewing go the way of TV game shows did about 3-4 years ago when there was a sudden explosion of them, and 95% of them died out and got sent back to morning/afternoon viewings.
Poker is being *overplayed* – I have cable TV here at work and everyday on at least 5 different cable channels there is some sort of tournament playing. Sure it’s popular but too much of a good thing is just that. Too much of a good thing.
A follow-up:
It has brought more fish to the tables….online poker is still booming! The increase in players (and bad play) is staggering.
The biggest drawback, the biggerit gets the greater the chance the government will no longer be able to ignore it. Regulation is coming, it’s just a matter of when.