[cferejohn]

Well, personally I think they should stick to pot-limit and no limit tournaments, though I don't mind watching games other than hold'em. I thought that the party-poker million was easily the least interesting to watch. Just watching the best hand get to the river over and over again isn't very intersting. Watching Phil Ivey blast someone off of top-pair top-kicker with nothing, now that's interesting. I don't think a non-tournament show would be very good since it has no natural ending point and no single 'winner', which makes for a lousy sports braodcast.

I think they need to find a professional sports commentator who has some poker knowledge (some of them must) to be the 'play-by-play' guy and have Mike Sexton do 'color'. A competent professional sports broadcaster would realize the importance of at least summarizing what has been missed ("now we jump forward to hand 37. In the interceding 10 hands a pre-flop raise or re-raise has taken the pot, with chip leader Phil Ivey steadily increasing his big stack"). This obviously means kick Van Patten to the curb. I start broadcasting school in the spring, so expect my resume in a couple years. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

On a related note, send Sexton to broadcasting school, or get him some one-on-one work with someone like Jon Miller or Bob Costas. He really needs to work on not saying the same things over and over. Perhaps he could swap them for poker lessons. He also needs to work on sounding less excited about routine plays (oh my god! someone bet out on the flop after a pre-flop raise when the flop didn't hit them?!). That way when something truly remarkable does happen (Gus Hansen makes a huge river bluff with nothing when a 3rd club calls), his excitement will be meaningful.

Admit we aren't seeing everything. I get the impression that the current producers of the show want to fool viewers into thinking they are seeing every hand (as the fact that they are missing many of them is never even mentioned), and frankly that's just silly.

Chip positions should be shown at the beginning of every shown hand, preferably in an overhead graphic that uses a graphics overlay to show everyone's name and number of chips, as well as the location of the button, the blinds, hand number, and time elapsed (actually blinds, hand number, and time elapsed could be kept almost constantly on screen in a corner display).

Guest commentators would be fun, but I would only want to have them in for a few hands. Broadcasting in a 3 man booth is tricky in the best of circumstances, and when you get someone inexperienced in there (especially someone with a stong personality, as some poker players have), it can be chaotic at best. See any baseball broadcast Reggie Jackson (and to a lesser extent, Jim Brown) has ever participated in for an example. If guest commentators are used, this is an even stronger reason to have a broadcasting professional running the thing.