The Saturation of Poker Shows

I love poker shows and am really glad that they’ve experienced so much success on the television market.  Poker After Dark, High Stakes Poker, and several other shows have been successes which has prompted a lot of other TV producers to create more new shows.  Face the Ace is one such instance of a new poker show which has spawned from the success of others, and what’s good about this one is that it’s in a primetime slot on Saturday, 9:00 pm ET on NBC.

What’s not so good about this show is that its debut was a big failure since Face the Ace placed last in ratings among shows at this time slot with 1.54.  Even worse is that a rerun of the tired-assed show on CBS called Numb3rs beat out Face the Ace by over 2 million viewers.  Now I’m no TV executive, but when a rerun beats your debut then it can’t be considered a success.  All of this has me wondering if there are too many new poker shows on the market now.

I mean Face the Ace has a good premise in that it involves a contestant playing against poker pros for $40,000 in the first round, $200,000 in the second round, and $1,000,000 in the third round.  And they can walk away with the money at any point during play which adds the game show element.  However, there are only so many ways which you can spin poker, and the way Face the Ace just spins it just isn’t drawing viewers.

But with Full Tilt Poker as a major sponsor for Face the Ace, it may survive long enough to attract new viewers.  But I don’t see it gaining many more viewers if the debut show can’t even peak people’s interests.