The start of 2009 has been a fruitful one for poker enthusiasts on television. On January 6th, 2009, the 7th season of the World Poker Tour started on Fox Sports Net. Just recently, the 5th season of the Poker After Dark began showing on NBC and on March 2009, the 5th season of the GSN High Stakes Poker will make its debut.
For the meantime, poker lovers can mark January 12th, 2009 on their calendars for the first of the 7 brand new episodes of the Best Damn Poker Show. The poker series will air on Fox Sports Network and is sponsored by UltimateBet.net. The online poker room will send its two main faces to participates, the legendary Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth. The Best Damn Poker show starts with 24 poker hopefuls battling it out, with contestants being sent home every week. The first installment will be shown at 9:00 p.m. in each time zone throughout the U.S. on January 12th, 2009. Duke and Hellmuth compete to see who can better teach Texas Holdem to the participants, turning them to ordinary poker players into formidable poker players capable of competing in major poker events.
Duke won a $2,000 buy-in cost Omaha High-Low Eight or Better event during the 2004 World Series of Poker for $137,000 and her first and so far only bracelet. She also won the Tournament of Champions that year for $2 million and is no stranger to poker television spotlight. Aside from her appearances on NBC's 1 vs. 100 and Poker After Dark, she will be participating on the upcoming edition of the Celebrity Apprentice, which also airs on the network. Hellmuth has 69 money finishes at the WSOP. Eleven of them or sixteen percent are for bracelets.
He leads Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson, in most WSOP bracelets, with Chan and Brunson owning 10 each. In 1989, Hellmuth became the youngest World Series of Poker Main Event winner at age 24, a record that stood for nearly twenty years before being broken in 2008 by Peter Eastgate of Denmark (who was 22 years old).
Extended versions of the Best Damn Poker Show Season II can also be found on the Internet. The Season I was won by Tracy Scala, who has since signed on to be a member of PokerStars' Star players team joining the likes of James Campbell and others. Aside from that, Ultimate Bet representatives traveled to Las Vegas for the 2008 World Series of Poker and picked players from the audience to audition. Each installment of the Best Damn Poker Show will re-air at 11:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. on Monday nights. There are a total of 7 episodes. The first season of the show aired in early 2008.
02/04/2009 19:02 PM