Home / Poker News December 2011 / The Poker Grapevine – HSP Pulled by GSN
The Poker Grapevine – HSP Pulled by GSN
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2011-12-09 10:41
High Stakes Poker, the iconic GSN show which entertained the poker playing public for quite a few years, has become another victim of Black Friday. GSN has apparently pulled the show off its 2012 schedule, after the quality of the lineup has plummeted under Norm McDonald’s hosting. The reasons for the show’s demise are numerous, but it’s clear that the lack of sponsorship funds from Full Tilt Poker and
PokerStars – none of them currently interested in the US market – was instrumental. High Stakes Poker has thus joined a whole bunch of similar Black Friday casualties: Poker After Dark, NBC’s National Heads-up Poker Championship and the PokerStars Big Game have all been cancelled as well.
In other news: while support for
online poker legislation seems to be swelling among live casino operators in Las Vegas, not everyone is on board with the idea that online poker and gambling would open up new opportunities for existing gambling interests. Sheldon Adelson of the Las Vegas Sands has recently said that he was morally opposed to online gambling, despite the fact that he had been known to hail a potential online poker law as a “window of opportunity” in the past. According to the Sands CEO, software measures meant to weed out underage online players were untested and unreliable and the issue of legal online poker would only be a distraction in 2012.
In still other news: the Alderney Gaming Control Commission has taken quite a bit of flak over the Full Tilt Poker ordeal. In an attempt to clean up its image, the Commission has decided to have an independent external reviewer assess the nature of its processes which resulted in the suspension and eventual revocation of Full Tilt Poker’s license. The external reviewer will be Peter Dean, a former Chairman of the British Gambling Commission.
The decision was taken to provide full transparency regarding the Commission’s actions in the Full Tilt Poker case.
