Why the 2025 WSOP Main Event Broadcast Isn’t Good for Promoting Poker 

The Visuals Are Dark, Dusty & Overwhelming

Somewhere between the Moneymaker Boom and record-breaking Main Events. WSOP decided to change the color palette of its broadcasts making it grim and full of visual noise.

Just compare these two frames from the WSOP Main Event Day 3 — the left is from 2011 and the right from 2025. We know that in 2011 it wasn’t a broadcast but a mini-movie with the best moments but maybe that is exactly the point — just look at these pictures.

In 2011, the WSOP Main Event Day 3 was bright, clear, and not so visually crowded — the infographics were modest and rarely topped the frame.

In 2025, the WSOP Main Event Day 3 is dark and dusty, the infographics “eat” a lot of space (including people’s heads sometimes) and the background is noisy to the point of giving you a headache.

The modern WSOP picture isn’t as “yummy” for the eyes because of lighting too. Think about it like this, if a player is wearing a cap. you can barely see their face under the massive shadow covering it. Again, just compare Daniel Negreanu from 2011 to 2025.

The Directorial Decisions Are Disturbing

Here, the visuals (again) say a lot more than word. For starters, we’ve chosen three quite extreme examples of why the director’s choices for the WSOP Main Event broadcast just aren’t good for viewers.

Look at the first screenshot and ask yourself: Where are the players who are playing the hand at the moment?

The answer is: Just behind the back of the guy who is taking up more than a half of the picture. He’s covering players because of a poorly chosen camera position.

Next, look at the second screenshot and answer: Who are the participants of this spot, what are the pot size and flop cards?

There is only one answer: the players are a man in grey on the right and another balding man in the left corner. In this case, the layout is off so even the commentators don’t have enough information for a decent broadcast.

Finally, look at the third screenshot and try to guess who is talking there?

The answer is Daniel Negreanu, who you can see on the right edge of the frame in the form of a nose, an ear and a beard under the cap. If it wasn’t clear, he’s talking to a ginger-bearded man on the left, whose face is 99% covered by infographics. 

Of course, old videos from the WSOP Main Event weren’t flawless in this respect — they also sometimes placed infographics a little clumsy but nowhere to this extent.

For example, look how in the Day 3 of the WSOP 2011 Main Event they decided to show outs for Todd Brunson and removed them 20 seconds later to show the player’s face.

At the same time, in 2025 the infographics overlap player’s heads, faces and other body parts so often that you have a good chance to never remember a player’s face because you almost never saw it without numbers on top.

You Can’t Hear Most of the Players’ Interchanges

In 2025, poker is quite a silent game even when it is on TV. That’s why commentators try to entertain and educate viewers a little during every broadcast. However, their efforts often backfire because they become so encompassed by their side story that they talk over players’ interactions without giving viewers a chance to hear them.

Also, the production team made a questionable decision to make players’ mics much quieter than commentators’ mics. As a result, if you make the volume higher to hear players, you’ll just end up with much louder sounds from the commentators that will deafen you at some point. 

And lets not even mention inconsistent commentator/guest volume and sound quality. In some cases, their balance isn’t even decent, not even remotely close to good.

Note: We did not evaluate the overall quality of commenting because it is mostly a matter of personal preference (unlike quality of sounds).

Douchy-ness Replaced Entertaining Personalities

The crisis of personalities and characters in poker is palpable: excluding the old-school and well-known poker faces, our industry has becomes bigger but dryer in terms of charisma. So, what do we have for the long broadcast periods in 2025 as a result?

People like Martin Kabrhel or William Kassouf who just can’t stop talking at the table, which makes watching the broadcast almost as tiring as watching it live.

Just imagine listening or watching six hours straight of William Kassouf talking and talking (and talking) just to try and get under your skin? Well, now you have this experience for free after deciding to watch some 2025 WSOP broadcast. And you can’t even stop him as Vanessa Kade tried too at the table.

Not to mention how exhausting, repulsive and obnoxious this can be for non-poker folks who may choose this exact stream to educate themselves on poker. We’ll (safely) bet that the likelihood of them coming to play poker after this will be close to zero.

Of course, there are a few smooth talkers at the tables — Hellmuth, Negreanu and Polk still played this event while Patrick Lyons brought his table to light as well — but they are a minority, often muffled by commentators.

So, we as viewers are forced to either watch the silent serious players under the often sideways comments of differently-volumed commentators or refrain from turning off the stream under the tirades of the likes of Kabrkhel and Kassouf.

Doubtful pleasure, don’t you think?

How WSOP Can Fix Its Broadcasts

From the viewer’s perspective maybe the good first step will be to go from quantity to quality. No one in their sane mind will be watching 11 days of the WSOP Main Event when an incomparable part of the field is recreational players who no one knows and no one cares about except their close ones.

Sorry, guys, but watching you folding anything but premiums while worrying about losing the only bullet in the Main Event isn’t entertaining and pleasant — it is mostly painful.

What is the point of watching more than 20 days of gloomy, overcrowded and overwhelmed fold pre 99% of the time WSOP broadcasts while you can take the best from this event before the final table and create a much shorter but more entertaining video about the journey from Day 1? With a good sound and color palette, correctly placed accents and high quality direction the WSOP can become great to rewatch.

The second step is to teach commentators to stop talking when vocal interchanges happen at the TV table. Let players’ personalities and relationships during the game show potential newcomers that poker isn’t just about sitting stoned faced for four plus hours. It can also be about having a good time socializing with different people. The commentators and WSOP organizers aren’t to blame for tournament poker becoming too serious to be entertaining to watch but it is in their power to decrease the seriousness a little.

By the way, training commentators not to side track during an active hand at the TV table can be useful too. Or at least ask them to pay more attention to the game and not themselves.

The third step is to stop giving the spotlight to annoying (by the general consensus) players. They can be entertaining for a little while but make watching the stream more and more uncomfortable over time. They also bring out the worst part of commentators’ personalities by annoying them to the extent they want to see that player brutally eliminated from the tournament or ask them to shut up directly into the microphone.