Week In Review #61 June 7th-June 12th 2026
What should the WSOP broadcast schedule look like?
Earlier this week, Patrick Leonard made a post prompted by this year’s WSOP coverage:
There’s something about watching the same high rollers getting it in with 99+ AK against eachother [sic] on repeat for the last 3 years that I just can’t watch the stream for more than a few minutes. Every now and again there will be an incredible hand that makes me fall in love with poker again, but they’re always clipped and easy to see standalone.
Also no interest in high stakes cash whales randomly flipping for infinite.
Because of huge over exposure to NLH streams it dilutes the excitement of main event streams since we have it available basically 365 days a year.
Things I’d love to watch/tune in for
- 10k mix championship fts with household legends
- Random rags to riches FTs
It generated a lot of discussion, and as someone who is now involved in all of the poker discussions, I figured I’d give my two cents. First, I think Pads’ post is inspired somewhat by a quirk in WSOP scheduling and less of an overall broadcasting philosophy. Due to player demand, the WSOP has grouped most of the high-stakes NLH tournaments in a tight window of time. During that week, most of the streams will be high-stakes NLH tourneys. By the time you’re reading the next Week In Review post, things will have changed, and I’d bet you’ll have seen some “rags to riches” FTs. Second, mixed FTs with household legends almost always get a good amount of stream time; it just depends on the caliber of those legends. If Negreanu, Hellmuth, or Ivey are at a $1500 Razz final table, I guarantee they’d show it on stream. If David Baker, Bryce Yockey, and Matt Ashton are battling for a $10k Limit O8 bracelet, probably not.
But let’s rewind a bit and ask a basic question: What is the goal of a filmed poker show? It varies. In some cases like the original WPT final tables on the Travel Channel and WSOP on ESPN, it was simply a TV show, and the goal was to get the highest ratings possible so they could sell ads. It was no different than the NBA regular season, Extreme Home Makeover or Gutfeld!.
The next generation of poker shows were things like the EPT or Poker After Dark, and while they wanted to get good ratings, their ultimate goal was to drive deposits to the sites that produced the TV shows. At this point in time, it was not technologically feasible to stream live poker on a 30 minute delay for several hours a day, so they recorded a lot of hands and edited it into a tight show, cutting out the breaks, preflop blind steals, and eight-minute river tanks. The gap between filming and broadcasting also allowed them to craft a narrative throughout the tournament. Pay attention to that flip you saw on day 1, it is not inconsequential b-roll; you might be seeing those characters later in the tournament. The delay meant that the broadcasts were less like the broadcast of a sports game and more like a reality TV show. They didn’t just show poker hands, they profiled the characters and showed you the world they lived in. Nowadays, they don’t always have the time to produce the human interest stories, and they might not want to interrupt a hand in progress to show a pre-recorded segment of Roman Hrabec playing hockey in the Swiss Elite League.
The ability to live stream tournaments is a blessing and a curse. You no longer need to wait months to see the WSOP Main Event on TV, nor do you need to avoid tournament spoilers for months. The ability to stream tournaments on a small delay turned broadcasts into less of a TV show and more of a sporting event. For those used to seeing a day of poker condensed into a couple hours of TV (minus ads and interstitial segments), watching unedited 10-hour days was tedious. However, these marathon streams were nice for operators, because it gave them more airtime to directly advertise their online poker site to potential customers.
We are now in a world where long unedited streams are a popular form of media, and poker has followed the lead. There is probably too much streamed poker, but there is also probably too much streamed everything. But unfortunately, the goal of poker streams is not to provide the best spectator experience or to be good stewards of the game, but to drive people to play poker somewhere. For series like Triton, I know that many people play tournaments because they watched the streams first. Triton wants as many eyeballs on their streams as they can get, but getting 10-20 VIPs to show up to an event because they saw the streams and thought “this looks fun” is another goal. The WSOP and EPT are also trying to attract new players, but they are not aiming to attract 10-20 high net worth individuals. I am sure they have internal data and analytics that tell them which streams get the most views and which streams convert the most viewers into depositors, but I am not privy to that data, and I am pretty out of touch with the average stream viewer. I don’t know if people want to see the best in the world, or watch Jo Pokers like themselves winning life-changing money. I do know that Pokerstars has mostly stopped streaming SHRs in favour of smaller stakes “rags to riches” tournaments, and I’d assume they didn’t just do that on a whim. So at least one of the biggest streamers is revealing what they believe the audience preferences to be.
People do like big-field main events, but from my experience, it seems like the most-viewed streams are the streams with the most famous players. Normally, those are your Iveys, Hellmuths and Negreanus. I have no idea how popular the next tier of famous pros are. I don’t know how much better a final table with Jason Koon, Alex Foxen, and Isaac Haxton would perform compared to one with Dimitar Danchev, Matthias Eibinger and Brandon Wilson. Either way, if you want to get the most viewed streams, you probably want the most well-known players, and the best way to get those players on stream is to pick tournaments with small fields. This includes the high stakes mixed tournaments, but some people won’t watch mixed games period. In the $100k NLHE, there is a ~10% chance that Negreanu and Ivey will be at the same table, and that will always attract eyeballs.
One thing Pads got right is that SHR FTs have a uniformity to them that’s a little boring. It’s not just that you’re seeing 99 get AIPF vs. AK a lot. It’s that the stacks are often so shallow that the all-in feels inevitable from the moment the cards are dealt. The best streamed hands are ones where something truly surprising happens, and in short-stacked poker you’re less likely to see those surprises. Personally, I’d be in favour of showing fewer final table streams and more day one streams. The poker is more interesting, the tables are more sociable, and the producers can make it more likely that they’ll have a couple big stars on stream.
I agree with those who noted that the four-hour delay at the WSOP this year is far too long, and I am not sure why they haven’t shortened it, but I think the fundamental problem here is one that is not unique to the poker landscape but is part of the entire world: Everything is recorded and broadcast, and no one can possibly watch it all. For people who remember excitedly waiting a week to see the newest episode of High Stakes Poker, streaming high level poker 365 days a year has become a be careful what you wish for situation. There is so much streaming footage that you can’t possibly watch it all, and most of the content will be forgettable. I have professional reasons to watch these streams, but I know this experience well. I am someone whose idea of a nice weekend is to sit down on my couch and watch Patrick Corbin and the Toronto Blue Jays battle Mitch Keller’s Pittsburgh Pirates for three hours. I might do the unheard of and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs farm team, the Marlies, play in the Calder Cup Finals this week.1 I doubt I’ll remember anything from these games within a couple weeks.
Fundamentally, poker media has two goals. The primary goal is to get new customers to play live tournaments or deposit on online sites. The secondary goal is to create a TV product that is as good as possible. Unfortunately, that hierarchy is bound to upset poker diehards who are not getting catered to, but I do not think the problem is with the Super High Rollers specifically, it’s simply that there is too much content. Anything that is streamed as often as poker is in 2026 will become a little monotonous, whether it’s HCL type cash games, big-field main events, or Super High Rollers.
Housekeeping
I saw an early version of Tim Adams, Daniel Dvoress and Stephen Chidwick’s newest Upswing course “Modern Tournament Mastery”. I recommend you buy it. Check it out.
I have started a new feature in the POTD discord. Where I share links to hands that I found interesting in the WSOP broadcast. If you’d like to join the Discord and see discussion on the hands in the #studywithsam channel, you can do so here. If you’d like to see the Google Doc, you can do so here.
For Run It Once’s Final Table Bootcamp.. I will be giving a lesson on
How to Approach Final Tables as …
There’s thousands of potential configurations that make every final table you play unique! Yet, there exist powerful heuristic that define the strategy for everyone. In this session Sam explores how you should approach the final table as… a short stack? A middling stack? The chip leader? But there’s crucial factors even beyond stack depth fundamentally shaping your strategy for the final table. You’ll walk away with a much clearer picture in mind when sitting at your next big shot at taking down a trophy.
You can sign up for the bootcamp for $7 here
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries. The past week I uploaded
A 185bb deep three bet pot sim for POTD #291
A Rocket Solver sim for the flop strategy on POTD #292
An HRC sim looking at inequal stack preflop and a PIO sim for POTD #293
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included in the main post. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #292, where I wrote about how c-bet strategies in heads up pots, can map onto multiway c-bet strategies.
POTD #292 onemorething
I’ve written a lot about how when you raise preflop and a player who has position on you flats next to act, you play heavy check with range on the flop. This was a good lesson for me to learn and was a welcome corrective to “if you have the betting lead, keep betting.” It’s rare for a board to be pure bet from the preflop raiser because even on the best of boards they rarely have significantly more than 50% equity. LJ vs HJ 50 deep OOP averages 49% and peaks at 56.5%.
So what are the tells for which boards are good ones to c-bet. Boards where OOP has offsuit combos of very strong hands and IP does not. In this hand the LJ raises every offsuit broadway (QTo and JTo mix and the rest are pure). The HJ mixes flats with AK, AQ, AJ, KQ and a tiny amount of KJo. So this means when the flop is KQT or JT9, OOP is pure check. Even a board, which seems bad for OOP like 987 is a very high frequency bet because of OOP’s straight advantage. So even though QJ2 is not a great board for OOP, our range has 49.1% on the flop, we have a set around the same amount as out opponent (probably more often vs many humans who will pure three bet JJ+ here), we have two pair more often than them (because they won’t flat QJo) and of course we have an overpair more often than them. In this hand I defaulted to range vs range strength, when I should have thought harder about the specifics of the situation.
Media
Last week in this space, I mentioned that Run It Once published one of my videos on YouTube and then I foolishly forgot to embed it. You can watch it here.
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Bluesky
I did end up watching the last 10 minutes of the third period of game 1.