The ratings for the World Series of Poker Main Event are in

When the World Series of Poker announced they were returning to ESPN coverage of the Main Event, the poker world got excited. After years of being behind a paywall with PokerGO, televised poker was returning to the masses, we hoped.

Just how successful that was has been revealed, as the live ratings for the WSOP Main Event Final Table have been released. As first reported by Lance Bradley in his Substack, day two of the Main Event final table had over 451,000 viewers, whilst the heads-up match on day three attracted 593,000 viewers. 

There are no viewing figures for the first day of the final table because it didn't break into the top 100 cable shows, so it wasn't reported by Nielsen.

This is quite a drop from when we last had the World Series of Poker on ESPN, where some of the title wins got close to 2 million viewers.

But if you expected viewing figures to be something similar, your expectations were probably too high. Television viewing is much more atomised these days, as there are more channels to watch, and, more significantly, TV is competing with subscription services like Netflix, as well as things like YouTube and, more generally, the devices in our hands. 

Is the future on YouTube?

The 2 million viewers that used to watch the Main Event finals would be roughly what the highest-rated show on American TV would get these days (usually news reporting). Getting more than half a million views for the finale this year is probably actually very impressive in the modern context. 

What is perhaps much more interesting are the combined views that the World Series of Poker social media channel received during the festival. This included the whole festival, including all the preliminary bracelet events, not just the Main Event. 

Almost 400 million views and almost a quarter of a million new followers were logged across the WSOP social channels. This included as much as 127 million views on Facebook alone. 

This is perhaps the most important metric going forward, as many in the industry believe that the future of the World Series of Poker broadcast is not on a terrestrial broadcaster but on YouTube instead. Now that GGPoker are the owners of the World Series of Poker, the hope is that their significant bankroll can stretch to making this loss leader happen to grow the game.