No, poker is not exciting. Go to a casino and I’ll bet all of my chips that most people can’t sit there and watch a poker table for two hours straight. But when it’s on TV we could watch it all day long. It’s exciting on TV. So what’s the difference? You can find poker on TV all the time now, but why?

Everyone can learn to play poker. We see the professionals on TV playing and we can actually play the same game at home, in a casino, in the break room at work, or anywhere we have a deck of cards. It’s different from watching football, basketball, auto-racing, and other sports because we can’t go and compete in these sports. Poker is the only game that I know of where anyone can enter the championship. I can take $10,000 to Las Vegas, buy a seat in the WSOP, and play against the top professionals in the world. I can’t walk into the Super Bowl and throw a touchdown pass.

The poker they show on TV is exciting because of the commentators and the drama. They only show us the big hands; the hands with a lot of betting and drama to them. It wouldn’t be very exciting if they showed the hands where everyone folded before the flop, leaving the player in the big blind to only win the small blind’s bet. It’s also exciting because there is so much at stake. You see pots for tens of thousands of dollars all the time, and it only gets higher as players are knocked out of the tournament. It’s exciting to watch someone make a gut call that could cost them thousands of dollars in prize money.

Over the past year, the number of poker shows has increased because of the demand. We want to watch poker played at a high level. We want to watch a “dead money” amateur like Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP.