PokerZone
PokerZone was a British television channel dedicated to poker and casino lifestyle programming. It broadcast on Sky Digital, launching on 19 May 2005 after a rebrand of the earlier Game In TV service, and it rode the mid-2000s boom in televised and online poker with tournament coverage, instructional programmes, live online games and celebrity chat. Its best-known original production was Heads Up with Richard Herring, the first British-produced poker chat show. The channel ended its poker programming on 25 March 2008, replacing it with roulette, and closed on 15 April 2008, when its place on the Sky guide was taken by the YouPlay services.
From Game In TV to PokerZone
The channel's roots lay in Game In TV, a gaming service that dated from 17 November 2003. On 26 April 2005 that service was rebranded as PokerZone, and the relaunched channel began broadcasting the following month, on 19 May 2005. The timing was deliberate. Poker was in the middle of an extraordinary surge of popularity in Britain: televised tournaments had created star players, online poker rooms were competing aggressively for British customers with advertising on billboards, buses, television and in magazines, and the channel's launch material estimated that an estimated $7 million a day was being spent in online card rooms in Britain alone. PokerZone was presented as the UK's new poker and casino lifestyle entertainment channel, available on Sky and via broadband, aimed squarely at the new audience of enthusiasts that this boom had created.
The channel also had ambitions beyond Britain. Its launch publicity said PokerZone was already setting its sights on expansion into Europe, reasoning that British gaming reform and the licensing of UK online poker rooms would raise awareness of poker across the continent and create new markets for the channel.
Life on Sky channel 226 and the move to 843
PokerZone began its life in the entertainment section of the Sky guide on channel 226. In October 2005 it announced a move to channel 843, to become part of a new dedicated Gaming and Dating section of the Sky programme guide. The recent increase in the popularity of gaming and casino television had prompted Sky to create the new area, and PokerZone would sit there among a number of its closest competitors. Shadowing was carried out across both 226 and 843 before the full move on 29 November 2005, after which the channel broadcast only on 843.
Director of Programming Samuel Orams welcomed the relocation, saying the channel had always maintained there was room for more than one shoe shop on the high street, that the team was confident in what it believed was a superior product, and that the move would bring a steady influx of focused viewers migrating from rival channels. The remark captured the crowded state of the market: PokerZone was not the only poker service on Sky. The Poker Channel, a separate venture, had launched in the UK on 23 March 2005, and casino and gaming channels were multiplying around it.
Programming: tournaments and live poker
The schedule combined recorded tournament coverage with formats built around online play. Programmes on the channel included Poker Night Live, the World of Poker, Inside Poker, Monte Carlo Millions and the Full-Tilt Poker Championship. Poker Night Live showed internet games for around three hours at a time, commentated on by poker experts, with viewers able to see all the cards because a time delay prevented cheating; celebrity guests were invited to take part in the featured tables. Richard Herring, who appeared as a celebrity guest on the programme in December 2005, left a wry first-hand account of the loosely organised production in his online diary, an incidental record of the channel's low-budget, live-to-air character.
The channel's own tournament format was Poker Bowl, a series of regular live poker tournaments featuring what were described as dealer's-eye-view graphics and in-depth commentary and analysis. The series featured leading European online qualifiers alongside celebrity players, including the actor Lou Diamond Phillips and the actor and poker player Michael Greco. Instructional and magazine elements ran through the schedule, reflecting the launch strategy of mixing star players, interviews and teaching programmes for the new audience learning the game from television.
Heads Up with Richard Herring
PokerZone's most durable production was Heads Up with Richard Herring, a celebrity chat show written by and starring the comedian Richard Herring, one half of the Lee and Herring double act known for BBC Two's Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Created by Ray Addison, the series ran for ten hour-long episodes, first broadcast from 6 November 2005 to 8 January 2006, filmed in front of a studio audience at the Whiteleys Centre in Bayswater, London. It was billed as an innovative fusion of comedy and poker chat and as the first UK-produced poker chat show.
The regular structure featured an opening monologue from Herring followed by individual interviews with three guests drawn from the worlds of poker and entertainment, talking about their lives, their careers and their love of poker; the title referred to heads-up play, the stage of a game where only two players remain. Across the series the guests ranged from professional players such as Greg Raymer, Dave Colclough, Barny Boatman, Roy Brindley and Andrew Black, to poker-playing celebrities including John McCririck, Phil Taylor, Michael Greco, James Hewitt and Norman Pace. Director of Programming Samuel Orams said Herring's wit and repartee would add dynamism to the line-up. The series gave the channel a programme with a life beyond the poker boom itself, and it remains the production most often associated with PokerZone's name.
Beyond poker: backgammon and roulette
Although poker was its identity, PokerZone experimented with other games. It had televised backgammon early, debuting what it described as the world's first televised matchplay backgammon event and a series of lifestyle documentaries around the game in 2005. In 2006 it collaborated with the online skill-gaming provider GameAccount to bring live backgammon to the channel under the High-Stakes Backgammon banner: each episode was to last three hours for an initial run of twelve episodes, with repeats, every weekend from October, using live in-game footage from GameAccount's WorldGammon brand, with PokerZone driving the editorial content. The partners argued that backgammon's status as a game of pure skill and its huge worldwide player base made it a natural fit for the channel's audience.
The channel also carried Monte Carlo Roulette. That strand would prove to be its ending as well as part of its schedule: roulette was the content that displaced poker entirely in the channel's final weeks.
Closure in 2008
On 25 March 2008 PokerZone ceased all poker programming and replaced it with Monte Carlo Roulette, which broadcast 24 hours a day; Poker Bowl was among the programmes that ended as a result. On Monday 31 March 2008 the Ofcom licences for PokerZone and YouPlay TV were renamed, ahead of the two Sky slots being relabelled YouPlay TV 1 on channel 843 and YouPlay TV 2 on channel 850, reflecting the change in programming and the discontinuation of the PokerZone brand in the UK. PokerZone closed on 15 April 2008 and was replaced by YouPlay 1 and 2.
The channel's lifespan, from May 2005 to April 2008, matched almost exactly the first great British poker boom that had called it into existence. When it launched, online poker rooms were spending heavily to reach British players and televised poker was producing household names; by 2008 the specialist gaming section of the Sky guide was consolidating around roulette and participation formats, and a channel built around poker lifestyle programming no longer had a place in it.
Legacy
PokerZone is remembered principally for Heads Up with Richard Herring, which survives in reference works as a small landmark — the first British poker chat show — and for its role in the brief period when poker supported multiple dedicated channels on British satellite television. Its history also records the mechanics of that era of Sky broadcasting: a rebrand from a predecessor gaming service, a launch timed to a gambling boom, a mid-life move across the electronic programme guide into a new gaming section, and a quiet replacement by roulette and interactive gaming brands once the boom cooled.
Assessment
As a London-based, privately backed venture, PokerZone never had the resources of the big channel groups, but for three years it gave British poker players a channel of their own. Its rise and fall tracked the market that created it with unusual precision: it appeared when online poker advertising and televised tournaments were at their height, diversified cautiously into related skill games such as backgammon, and disappeared when broadcasters concluded that roulette and participation gaming made better use of a slot in the gaming section of the guide.
