[SumZero]

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The Main Event also gets the best coverage of any tournament. How many hours are we getting for the Main Event this year? 10 or more?
Most of that coverage is non-final table hands in which there is no need to show lots of knock-out hands.

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Yeah, that. Even compressing a full day into 1 hour of coverage (like day 1A and 1B) we got to see a different kind of poker from what is usually shown because of the deep stacks and slow blind structure so we got to see decisions and moves on all the streets.

The best TV poker I've seen IMO is the Championship Poker at the Plaza on FSN, and that was again because of the structure of the tournament, mixed with the hours of coverage, to give high quality poker and show some top notch poker on the way to Daniel Negreanu's win.

The Main Event is like that because we get to see all the stages of the tournament, some early, some mid-game, some bubble play, and the final table coverage.

Norman Chad was on the podcast poker show from Vancouver and mentioned how in a typical WSOP 1 hour coverage of one of the other events there is 46 minutes of coverage, and once you take out time for background color, the rules of the game, player profiles, Hold'em or Fold'em, and the Nuts you have time for ~15, maybe 20, final table hands. And the typical 10 person final table has 200+ hands. So less than 10% of the final table hands are shown and 0% of the non-final table hands are shown. Even if <1% of the non-final table hands are shown, showing 100+ of them does add to the context of the main event tournament.

And even if people argue if the Daniel Negreanu laydowns in day 1B were superior laydowns or merely decent/good ones, to see that kind of decision making on several different streets rather than the all-in fest of the typical TV poker is worth while.

And all of that is why the main event is destination TV for poker watching, before even getting into the fact that the main event is in a class of its own in terms of prestige as a tournament.