The Current “High Stakes Poker” Situation

I know we’re behind on the game discussing the whole High Stakes Poker fiasco with A.J. Benza being fired and everything, but I just wanted to wait until I got a lot more information.  Especially information from very credible sources.  One of these credible sources happens to be A.J. Benza.  He’s great and I really feel for him.  I also feel a horrible horrible mistake that is going to hurt the show a bit was made.  Read A.J.’s blog if you get a chance by clicking here.  It’s an interesting read. I’ve been talking to A.J., who I never got the chance to talk to before, and he’s really fantastic.  He got completely screwed on this and we’ll have more with him coming up, trust me.

For those not familiar High Stakes Poker is a pretty popular poker show airing on GSN on Sunday nights with a lot of history, particularly in the last few years.  It was hosted by Gabe Kaplan and A.J. Benza since its start in 2006.  It’s done well in the key demographics, and it’s really the only show on GSN to ever do so.  It seemed to be liked up through around December 2007 or January 2008.  I can tell you from personal experience  that the show looked like it was on its way out.  The basic discussion I remember was High Stakes Poker and the channel’s other fantastic show World Series of Blackjack, both of which were ratings winners, just didn’t fit or just weren’t liked and it was felt they weren’t needed anymore.  It took some fighting but High Stakes Poker luckily stayed on.  Apparently there was no discussion that could save Blackjack.

Again, I can just foresee messiness with this.  There’s already been a relatively decent amount of backlash about A.J.’s firing which is both great and bad.  It’s great that so many people are that passionate about it.  It sucks for GSN because they only only gets like 300K-400K viewers an episode and if there’s a decent amount of people who are pissed about the change and stop watching it’ll start to show in the ratings unlike the major networks.  A.J. really got screwed hard here and the results will be interesting to see.  They are apparently bringing in a female co-host to be on the floor.  So essentially the network looked at NBC’s Poker After Dark and decided to copy that.

I can’t see it working but frankly it’s like they haven’t wanted High Stakes Poker in a while.  A.J. is correct in that he’s basically the only one to give out any giant exposure about it.  For the most recent season all I can see I got was one press release and about a dozen pictures with no context.  It’s a bit hard to market and sell a show to viewers when people don’t know it’s still around and new.  Again, this seems like a problem that started happening around mid to late 2008.  So yeah I don’t think anything good will come of this but we’ll have to see when the new season starts.

There’s one lesson I’ve learned from working with GSN for five years now which has to be longer than anyone currently employed by Sony has worked at that network I’d imagine.  They don’t have spare audiences and casual passers-by.  They have the big fans of particular programs and that’s it.  Once you alienate and piss them off they go away.  With poker they’ll definitely go away because there are other alternatives out there unlike game shows for a few more months.  The viewers of High Stakes Poker are the poker fans who read up about it.  This story got some actual attention in a lot of places and caused a relatively decent commotion.  Was it really worth the risk?  We’ll find out when the new season starts.  All I know is not only have the fans voiced their concerns but I haven’t heard from one industry expert who thinks this was a smart idea.

We’ll have lots more on this in the next few days and weeks.