After much conjecture and rumor in the poker world, it was announced on Tuesday that Harrah’s Entertainment, the owners of the World Series of Poker, and cable sports monolith ESPN have officially extended their broadcast partnership of the most prestigious event in poker through 2018. The original deal was set to expire at the end of next year’s WSOP.
As part of the deal, ESPN has agreed to televise 32 hours per year of the World Series. This coverage is normally concentrated on the Championship Event (24 hours of coverage are dedicated to this year’s 40th anniversary tournament) but will also encompass other popular bracelet events in the future. Original programming will air on ESPN and future repeat broadcasts will be shown on the rest of ESPN’s broadcasting family, including ESPN2, ESPNClassic and ESPN International. The WSOP will also be a prominent part of ESPN’s online offerings through ESPN.com and ESPN360.com.
“The WSOP is proud to call ESPN home for another nine years”, an exuberant Jeffrey Pollack, President of Harrah’s Interactive Entertainment and Commissioner of the World Series of Poker, said. “This long-term agreement ensures that our content will continue to reach sports fans around the world through a wide variety of platforms.” Doug White, the senior director of programming and acquisitions at ESPN, echoed Pollack’s comments when he added, “We are very excited to continue our relationship with Harrah’s to deliver the largest, richest, and most prestigious gaming event in the world to fans across a variety of our platforms. Poker continues to be a solid ratings performer for us and allows us to continue offering diverse programming to our viewers.”
The 2009 television ratings for the World Series, which has sponsorship through Jack Link’s Beef Jerky, have been slightly down over the first two weeks of broadcasts that featured the special 40th Anniversary $40K No Limit Hold’em tournament and the Champions’ Invitational. The numbers have shown an 8% drop in television ratings through the first two weeks to an 0.72 rating versus last year‘s 0.78. In addition to ratings seeing an 8% slide, household impressions also fell, albeit a modest 5%. The total number of household impressions through two weeks of the 2009 WSOP was 714,904, compared with last year’s tally of 750,315.
The renewed agreement between the World Series and ESPN continues a longstanding relationship between the two. ESPN returned to broadcasting the World Series in 2003 – notable for the raucous and surprising victory of Chris Moneymaker – and has continued to put the venerable poker tournament on the air since then. Last year, ESPN and Harrah’s devised the “November Nine” concept, which delayed the final table to November to allow for a “plausibly live” broadcast of the Championship Event final table, which was received with a surge in ratings on ESPN when broadcast the same day the World Champion was determined.
ESPN has been the primary broadcast outlet for the World Series since the late 1980s. Other than a two-year period in the early 2000s – when the Discovery Channel produced documentaries on the year’s play (2000 and 2001) – and a year where there was no coverage at all (1996), coverage of the tournament by ESPN can be traced back to 1988. Prior to that time, the World Series was broadcast as a part of the CBS sports programming “CBS Sports Spectacular” or was taped as a specialty broadcast by the WSOP’s previous owner, Binion’s Horseshoe, without a network home.
With the agreement in place for future broadcasts of the World Series of Poker, the sport of poker has found that it will always have a television home with ESPN as the game continues to intrigue players worldwide.
