I completely disagree with basically every word of this. NLHE is not even remotely close to being completely worked out for any intent or purpose. The best players have a pretty good idea what's going on in most of the common 6max spots, but everyone is more or less completely winging it as soon as you throw in any variables like deep stacks, loose recs, straddles, etc.. And even if that weren't the case, NLHE is still nowhere even remotely close to chess in terms of the optimal strategies being worked out, yet the popularity of chess hasn't really suffered at all over the years despite decades of doomsaying. I also disagree with the idea that the average player knowing more about the game today limits creative freedom. Was poker really more interesting when everyone always cbet every hand where they were the PFR and every bet on every street was always 2/3 pot?

I think what made the old shows great was that the pros at the table were advertised to be the best in the world. What attracts viewers to any competition where the viewers have no vested interest in the competitors is mainly the idea that they're watching the best in the world. That's why gimmick sports like arena football, 3v3 basketball, etc. always fail. The quality of the format of the competition is much less important than the quality of the competitors. That's what the poker streams don't get. Sure, it's an entertaining spectacle to watch twitch streamers and clueless businessmen punt off tens of thousands of dollars in a game they barely know how to play, but that's not a recipe for long-term interest. Even within the recent era of stream games, the single most popular player was the guy who was considered the best.

To make a poker show today comparable to the golden age of TV poker, you'd need a mix from a few categories of players:

1. The famous "old guard" guys that have at least a popular illusion of still being elite players like DNegs, Polk, Dwan, Antonius, Ivey, Jungleman, etc.

2. The actual best cash game players in the world like Linus and Stefan. Even players just one step down like Limitless and Trueteller can't replace having the actual best players. There's a certain awe-factor that comes into play when watching someone who might be the best in the world compete. That's why Magnus Carlsen is 10x more popular than the next best chess player. The players in any sport or competition who can make a reasonable claim to being the best are always significantly more popular than the next best players, and the dropoff is usually enormous. The reason we don't see that as much in poker is because the average casual viewer doesn't even know who the best players are. Obviously the best players would need to be advertised as such in order for this hypothetical show to be comparable to the original seasons of HSP. This is the category that's the hardest to fill and is obviously the one that's missing from today's poker streams.

3. Recs who take an actual interest in the strategy of the game and aren't completely clueless whales, like Bill Klein and Guy Laliberte.

The most popular and impactful televised poker content was built partially through the David vs. Goliath archetype (Moneymaker's WSOP run in 2003, randoms making runs at the final table in the early WPT seasons). PokerGO has leaned heavily into the high roller scene and I think it's generally a bore. I don't care to watch the same 20 high rollers trade giant scores playing perfect poker. It's not interesting and not particularly transferable to the stakes and games most people play. Moreover, there's not much drama since those guys are either rich already or backed. You don't feel like the money means much to them. Just a few more million dollars on top of the 30M in winnings they already have. Far cry from Moneymaker playing for life-changing money against a random assortment of pros, whales, and degens.

To answer the OP, I think a lot of it comes down to the newness. The way poker was presented in Rounders, the WPT, and the early WSOP seasons made it seem more glamorous and interesting than it actually is. Now that it's more familiar to most of us, the mythical aspects have become mundane and tired. Beyond that, there's a lack of good storytelling in the way the game is presented. Shows tend to focus on action while ignoring the human angle. It's just a bunch of cool hands that don't have a larger context. It's like watching fun movie scenes that don't fit together into a cohesive plot. You lost a lot of the magic.

One thing the 2003 WSOP did very well was build storylines and turn the players into characters. There was a narrative throughline.

You lose that when you're just live-streaming the final table of some random $10k or $25k.

In the case of the early seasons of WPT, it was the mystique of the show and the way that the old pros were portrayed and how the whole production of the show was put together with the lighting, the announcements of the hands and the commentary. Not many people were aware of the game or knew how to play it back then so that added to the intrigue.

IMO, its because poker was new, exciting and a mystery plus the players who rose to the top in those days had entertaining personalities and were characters. Guys like Doyle, Amarillo Slim, Puggy, etc had to be engaging to in order to entice suckers to play with them and keep criminals from robbing and/or shooting them

24 tabling online & running computer sims doesnt require an entertaining personality and certainly doesn't hone one

They had ESPN production talent, planning, etc. They knew that the storylines were the selling point.
That's what made a lot of early poker so compelling. Old pre-boom grinders like Al Krux final-tabling the main in 04 in or Thunder Keller at a table with Eskimo Clark and James Sousa going all in every hand.
Ellix Powers and "He called me with jack high!!" etc...

This has been largely lost now that poker media no longer is angling towards bringing in the lay-audience, since anyone watching poker religiously in 2023 isn't the same guy it was in 2005.

What we do have now (and I say this as someone who deeply loves the commentating of Gabe Kaplan) is ridiculously good commentating.
Ali Nejad's commentating of some 'ladies night' game shown on PokerGo/Pluto was probably the most concise, coherent, perfectly metered, flawless commentating I've ever heard from any televised event of any kind.

The biggest problem is all the old shows were taped. It’s easy to tell good stories about an upset winner if you know they win a couple months in advance. Or if you cut down 200 hands from a day to 10-13.

NLHE is much closer to being solved than chess. We currently have an approximation for NLHE being solved.

Chess isn't even at a complete 8 pieces solved.



For most games, "solved" is generally accepted to be the point when humans can no longer beat an AI. Meaning that we have surpassed the point where humans can replicate the strategy and the rest is beyond diminishing returns.....it's basically useless in real life.

We have already passed the point where a human can replicate a solver. The rest of the "solve" will either be very small adjustments in the general theory.....or just too deep down the rabbit hole to matter.

Yea you could actually get better at poker or except the fact that nerd is better at it than you.

Just yesterday I saw the EPT Monte Carlon final table stream pop up in my Youtube feed, so I watched it for half an hour or so. It was ****ing unbearable. The table was full of mutes, there was a couple of guys who would pull up their hoodie, cover their mouth with the hoodie etc every time they played a hand, no table talk whatsoever, no suspense, no drama, no nothing. I don´t understand why anyone would watch something like this.

Back in the days, the games were full of characters, people weren´t acting like it´s a matter of live and death whether to fold JTo to a three-bet in a button vs BB spot and there were actually quite a few players who had functioning vocal cords.

What made the old poker tv shows great was the lack of asocial nerds who cream their Y-fronts over Piosolver simulations. Although the skill level is clearly higher now, there's only so interesting a person can be if they spend most of their free time sat in front of a computer.

I'm better at poker than you lol.

i always watched poker to see the babes. rick have you had 5 tatted up babes in your van yet?

What got me into poker was Late Night Poker in the UK. The dark room, tense atmosphere and big personalities made it great. There was also an element of learning: they used to call up the hand rankings every now and then and talk about the basics. Novelty was also a factor.

I do wonder how new people decide to play online now. It must be YouTube recommendations, or their friends get them into it. There's not a lot out there for beginners anymore though. I wonder if it's a lot like me trying to figure out chess recently: I've no idea why somebody like Magnus is doing what they do and would benefit from some dumbed down commentary. Otherwise, I can't see my slim interest growing like it did with poker.

Almost every commentator these days attempts to predict future action so they can ‘prove’ themselves to the audience. The audience doesn’t give af and would rather you didn’t spoil it. Just make us think & laugh. Leave the doors open, and focus on glorifying the players.

it would be better if there were 200BB starting stack cash games and everyone was shoving preflop. be great to see 27o beat AA. Has to be a $1 million dollar buy-in.

Poker popularity runs in multi year cycles called "The Poker MegaWave". No amount of content quality from the broadcasters can make a dent in these cycles. If it is on a downtrend it will stay in downtrend; if on an uptrend it will stay uptrend. Any interference will not have any effect.

The Moneymaker Boom surely triggered the greatest Poker MegaWave of all-time. Unpredictable stochastic shocks will create the next one.

None of this is true at all. You also blatantly switch definitions of “solved” to fit your argument half way through your post. It’s just a fact that NLHE is both practically and computationally much more complex to solve than chess. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.

Neither chess nor poker are solved by the actual definition, but chess engines are way WAY better than humans while solvers have inherent limitations that make them worse than humans in some formats. And again, chess hasn’t suffered at all from the improvements in chess engines.

I mean Doug yea but Perrson (besides this last HSP episode) plays so many hands like a savage it makes for great TV. And really his antics have been against people dishing it out first (at least from what I've seen). He'd be awesome in 2008.

Yep, back then the poker world felt like a big cool movie, with main and side characters, all with interesting background stories, like Matusow, or Ivey/PA. All while giving the new players the prospective to also be a part of that movie one day.

But to be honest, nowadays it is going again into this direction, with all the big streams and drama. There was a dark period around 2018, but as a previous poster said, it is happening in waves, and poker is in fact in a very good state again, people should stop being so pessimistic and see the good things, albeit it is different now

sure but you arent better than those nerds

They have chess boxing, how about poker boxing.

I think the answer is pretty simple - they were the only means to view actual poker at the time, as opposed to YouTube, PokerGo, and Streams now to name just a few, and, accordingly, felt fresh. All of us who are old enough probably remember where we were when Yukon Brad bluff raised Ivey all in with those huge bricks of bills, Farha and Gold played their AA vs. KK hand, Hevad Khan did his Red Bull fueled antics, or Raymer got his revenge on Mike the Mouth, sending him to the rail in tears. You can't replicate those nowadays.

Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Tom Dwan and Doyle Brunson

5thStreet, are you the person who had a blog on televised poker back in the day? I can't add anything to the posts you've already made in this thread – they're right where I am when it comes to the OP's question.

For everyone who just totally disregarded my own answer (so everybody), which was that the original poker shows explained the rules of NLHE, where did you learn how to play poker? Because I literally learned how to play no limit hold em when I randomly flipped on to the Travel Channel in 2003 and saw Gus Hansen win a WPT. And in the show they explained the rules of nlhe. All of these other old shows that don't explain the rules I don't care about, they aren't the same as the og poker shows. If I was going to make a poker show today I would explain the rules every episode as redundant as that might seem today. And I would just get rid of all the technical garbage vpip, etc. Leave % but that's it. We aren't counting people stats like a bunch of nerds on my tv show. Get the eff outta here with that crap.

Imagine had I tuned in that day, they never explain how any of the betting or the streets or blinds or anything works and I'm a slightly stupider person not the megagenius you all know me for and I just can't put everything together. I tune out and think "poker's stupid" because I was too stupid to understand what was going on. Try to put yourself in the mind of a stupid person who doesn't know how to play poker, it shouldn't be that hard for you guys.