A few pages back I posted that this was likely the result of a producer/executive ego gone wild....
Back when the change from Benza to Scott was announced, GSN Vice President of Programming and Development David Schiff told Poker News Daily, “We’re into the sixth season and we felt like it was time to freshen it up. Our feeling was that we wanted viewers to be in the room with the players. Gabe and A.J. did a good job, but they were disconnected from the action.” With the addition of Scott, who handles floor interviews, GSN has apparently achieved that goal. Whether viewers stick with future episodes of “High Stakes Poker” without Benza in the booth remains to be seen.
There you go.
"Removed from the action?" Says who? Sounds to me like the fan-base found them a very integral part of the action.
Even better in that quote was the "we felt" portion. In other words... we didn't put any sort of feelers out or go off of any sort of collected data... we just thought we could interject our egos into the show at whim.
As I said, these people will happily run this show into the ground before they admit they were wrong. This new format is absolutely horrible. But, it's not about the quality of the programming... it's about the egos of those producing it.
Believe me when I tell you, they couldn't care less about this petition.
http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/petiti...ns-steam-8484/