Is it the right cards?

October is arguably the best month for sports. Baseball features the playoffs and World Series, the NBA season tips off and NFL and college football are always hot.

ESPN, which covers NBA, college football and NFL Monday Night Football games in the Fall months ( they only one they don't cover is playoff baseball or the World Series)also covers another big sport; The World Series of Poker.

Since the early 2000's ESPn has covered the World Series of Poker during the summertime, a relatively slow time for sports. But this year, for the second year in a row, ESPN covers the World Series of Poker in the summertime, than, after thousands of contestants have been eliminated and there is one table remaining, they take a two month delay to show fans the live table in the November.

To hype up the event, ESPN is showing a documentary of Phil Ivey, one of the worlds best poker players in the world, on their newest show, E60. http://www.casinocitytimes.com/news/article/ivey-to-appear-on-espn-newsmagazine-show-180224

The event will be shown live on ESPN from November 7th-9th ( with a 15-minute delay so people cant call in players and tell them what cards other playeers have)"The final nine players remaining in the main event will once again go on a four-month hiatus before coming back to play out the action Nov. 7-10. After an amazing turnout to see Peter Eastgate win the 2008 championship, this year's finale will take place in front of a live audience and will receive special prime-time coverage on ESPN." http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/news/story?id=3860083)

From a scheduling standpoint, the World Series of baseball will be over by than, but November 7th-9th is a weekend, which smacks right in the middle of the pro and college football weekend. But according to last years numbers, (http://www.womanpokerplayer.com/news/index.php?/archives/175-2008-World-Series-of-Poker-Grows-in-Participants,-Prize-Pool,-Ratings-and-All-Time-Records.html)which featured an 18 percent increase since 2004, when the WSOP was shown in the summer and not shown live.

The move to live in November works for two reason; one, the event in the summer was losing ratings the past few years because people already knew who the winner was. Typically, ESPN would show the event ( which really took place in May) in August, and as the event grew bigger over the years, online sites, like ESPN.com would announce the winner of the Main Event months before it happened. Now, poker fans can watch live, not knowing who the winner is.

Secondly, showing the event live allows for to not really be able to Tive or DVR the event. If one chooses to do so, they better watch the even quickly or else any one of their friends, co-workers or news sites will tell them who has been eliminated. While cable TV, along with network TV is getting killed due to Tivo and DVR, sports events still do pretty well with advertising because most people have to watch a game live. In today's media intensified world, one cannot afford to record a game and wait to watch the results later. More time rather than not someone tells them the winner.

As with the WSOP, poker fans will be forced to watch the main event live. For ESPN, hopefully that will force them to see some adds.