Yet.

Which has a lot of people more than a little angry. For poker players High Stakes Poker is THE show that you wait for each week. Other than the WSOP main event coverage I do not watch any other poker show, not even the WPT, I would rather watch American Gladiator’s. How did it come to this? Well hold your suspenders because most people believe it will be coming back but GSN is just trying to milk the WPT broadcasts for all they are worth. Which sort of misses the point. High Stakes poker is the best rated poker program on GSN, they are really running a risk that a competing network can steal the cash game show from them.

Tournament poker just is not the same for people who understand the game, the networks like to focus on the “lottery moments” in a tournament and the silly segments that are meant to entertain your wife when you force her to watch with you. High Stakes Poker did not need any of that because they had millions of dollars on the table and that created it’s own drama.

The producers of High Stakes Poker also produce Poker After Dark on NBC. It would be nice to see them scrap the PAD half cash half tournament format and get some big boys throwing around 25k chips.

Yet again it just seems that poker just does everything wrong, almost consistently. I think we are all going to look back and think of a wasted opportunity on a lot of things because people got too cute. GSN taking on the WPT might have been a good idea but for them to lose focus on a valuable property like High Stakes Poker is really missing the point for people who watch poker on television.