I did an interview with actress and poker player, Jennifer Tilly, a few days ago (one we will post here soon) and we talked about her days as one of the poker stars on the show “Celebrity Poker Showdown”. After we had finished, I began to wonder if a Texas Hold’em themed show of that nature would work in today’s entertainment world. First of all, I have to admit; I am biased and always have been partial to that particular program. Watching Hollywood personalities and poker stars playing in that forum was one of my guilty pleasures. The other one was watching “The Flavor of Love”, but that is a whole other topic. Now that I think about it, the show was ahead of its time, and if revamped could probably succeed among the rest of Texas Hold’em television products.
One of the problems with CPS was that there was just some bad no limit holdem being played. Jennifer had told me she that is almost embarrassed when she goes back and watches how she played some poker hands on that show. Obviously the Jennifer Tilly of today would perform better than her 2005 counterpart, as would a lot of the poker players who showed up on that program. Secondly, a lot of the people who are pure poker players have also crossed over into the celebrity world. This means nobody would be scraping the bottom of the barrel, and coming up with Dennis Rodman as a contestant. Instead you could probably put Kara Scott or Daniel Negreanu in that seat. In short, if the show were being produced today, the quality of the poker hands would be much better.
Today there are a lot of really quality poker players who happen to also walk the red carpet as celebrities. There are also of pure poker stars that may not show up in a summer blockbuster, but are recognized in the pop culture as sports celebrities. If they re-launched the show, substituting Dave Foley with Conan O’Brien (I hear he’s available) and maybe replacing Phil Gordon with Lacey Jones, it would probably be a pretty big hit. Somebody ought to do that someday (hopefully my boss is reading).
