What do you get when you put the world’s best poker players and the game’s biggest personalities all around a single table? The answer is the high-stakes, winner-takes-all tournament known as Poker After Dark. Tune in to NBC (or Setanta Ireland in the UK) every single night to see the cards fly, the tempers flare and the chips fall on NBC’s groundbreaking poker program, sponsored by Full Tilt Poker.
The show was launched on 2 January 2007, assembling six of the world’s best poker players around a table in Las Vegas. The invitation-only event with a $20,000 buy-in and a $120,000 single prize became an instant hit. It is the ideal setting to watch poker pros prove that it takes more than just good cards to make a winning player.
The hour-long program, which has gone through a variety of lovely hosts since its inception, shows a much more intimate view of the poker table’s dynamics than a traditional televised tournament. While most broadcasts whittle a poker tournament down to a two-hour timeslot, Poker After Dark splits each week’s tournament into five one-hour episodes, the last of which is a “director’s cut” that includes excerpts from the previous days’ action. There is minimal commentary from Ali Nejad, which allows the miked players to provide the more colourful throughout the game.
Another feature of Poker After Dark that sets it apart from other televised poker tournaments is the thematic arrangement of poker players each week. For instance, the “Hecklers” night featured Mike Matusow, Shawn Sheikhan, Gavin Smith, Jean-Robert Bellande, Phil Hellmuth and Sam Grizzle – poker pros all known for their active mouths around the table. The “World Series Legends” looked just as it sounded, bringing together WSOP winners Chris Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth, Erik Seidel, Layne Flack, Doyle Brunson and T.J. Cloutier. And the “Love At First Raise” week saw real-life poker couples facing each other, including Jennifer Harman and Marco Traniello, Jennifer Tilly and Phil Laak, and David Benyamine and Erica Schoenberg.
For more entertaining match-ups and first caliber poker, tune it to Poker After Dark tonight. If you can’t find it airing on your television, stop by pokerafterdark.com for full episodes.
