Poker News

Jon Miller: NBC Senior VP

High stakes poker’s continued big time appeal may persuade NBC to take a shot at the rights to televise poker’s biggest event, the World Series of Poker.

ESPN’s current agreement has it televising the Series through the completion of thisyear’s event, but the shape of things to come appears up for grabs. The contract expires this year and although ESPN may be in the driver’s seat for the moment, this can change.

Harrah’s officials have publicly maintained a very positive tone about their relationship with ESPN, describing the partnership as a “very good one,” but a dependable unofficial source says the truth is something other than that.

“Dealing with ESPN is not easy,” this source outside Harrah’s alleges, “and with big time poker very much in demand, ESPN will feel more pressure than it ever has before to step up to the plate in a big way.

NBC’s senior vp for sports programming Jon Miller maintains an enthusiastic outlook with respect to the prospects for poker on his network, but he declines comment about NBC’s interest in the World Series of Poker.

“I can’t talk about that,” he says.

Miller and NBC, in the meantime, have developed an approach to poker programming that seems to promise more big names playing for big money. This approach to the future is apparently based on the success of the Poker Superstars Championship that aired for two hourson NBC this past Super Bowl Sunday and, more recently, the first several rounds of elimination action in the National Heads-Up Championship filmed at the Golden Nugget this past March. The first of the rounds produced a 1.4 market share, the second a 1.5 and the third a 1.7. Each rating point is equivalent to about a million television households.

“With 2.3 people watching each set, that’s a lot of people tuned into poker, and by the way, this does not include, bars, hotels, college campuses and so forth.”

What this seems to say about the future of poker on television is that the best is yet to come as the biggest networks focus more attention on a game that was once relegated to smoky backrooms and the corners of casinos.

“These numbers say a lot about the appetite for poker and our approach to these shows,” Miller says. “We got into got into poker a couple of years ago. We did a program for Super Bowl Sunday in 2004. That was the Battle of Champions with Steve Lipscomb and the World Poker Tour. It worked out great but unfortunately the Travel Channel (which had an agreement to televise WPT action) was not real crazy about us doing business with the World Poker Tour and that had the effect of making our involvement a one-year kind of thing.”

So the network began looking for another vehicle that would help it reap some of the same benefits then going to smaller cable channels. What followed was a relationship with Henry Orenstein, developer of the mini-cam technology enabling home viewers to know more about the cards being held and played at the table than the players themselves.

That relationship with Orenstein and his marketing team led to the first Poker Superstars filming over several days at the Palms in Las Vegas in the spring of 2004. Preliminary rounds were later aired on the FSN cable network. The championship table involving an invited list of poker’s most successful players, aired this past Super Bowl Sunday.

“It did even better than the show we had done on Super Bowl Sunday the year before,” Miller says, “and from our perspective at the network it was a much healthier, better working relationship than the year before.”

As far as rating went, the Superstars final “actually beat the NBA which was up against us that Sunday.”

In the wake of this success, the question facing the network was not whether it would do more pokerrelated projects, but what kind of venture would it get behind.

Miller says, “During the time we were getting ready for the Poker Superstars, a bright young producer - his name is Jamie Horowitz - came to me with an idea for a different type of poker.”

“We had been inundated here at the network by all kinds of people wanting to pitch poker programs but all of them were pretty much alike . . . you know, guys sitting around a poker table. There would be different ways to qualify for a presence at this table, but there was nothing to really set one idea apart from all the other look-alikes.”

What Horowitz proposed and Miller subsequently decided to run with was heads-up competition - one player against another.

Miller continues, “There had been heads-up tournaments before, but in this case Jamie wanted to set it up like a blind draw with no seeding. And then working your way down from the top 64 players to 32 and 16, until you had the last two sitting across the table from each other in the championship round.”

NBC decided it liked the idea and returned to the poker experts who had helped it put together the Superstars project. The player list would be invited, thereby guaranteeing the presence of big names, whatever the match of the moment might be.

Miller says there were “several casinos interesting in hosting” this project. The list included casinos that had previously hosted television poker projects in and outside of Las Vegas, but NBC eventually agreed that it liked the proposal involving the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

“A lot of credit goes to the guys at the Golden Nugget for making this possible,” Miller says. “They really saw the value of a big time long network series. It worked out well because the Golden Nugget was really sort of a launching pad for poker in Las Vegas.”

The connection between poker’s earliest days in Las Vegas - the Nugget opened in the mid-1940s - and what poker has become made a fun, easy, connection for a lot of people.

“I know that they (Golden Nugget officials) will tell you,” Miller chuckles, “that they have gotten a lot more (exposure) than they ever bargained for because, originally, this was only going to be four shows, but it has since grown to six shows and eight hours which is being repeated on CNBC.”

How was the decision made to increase the exposure?

“Once we left Las Vegas,” Miller says, “We realized immediately that we had a lot more content than we had originally planned on, so we went ahead and created the windows for doing it.”

The championship event won by Phil Hellmuth will be aired for the first time on May 22.

Miller says he realized there was no chance of keeping the identity of the winner a secret. “The last four matches were played before packed houses and there was no way we were going to keep these people from talking.”

Which says a lot about the appeal of televised poker for the home viewers who can know what cards are being played from the moment they are dealt.”

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