The new season of NBC’s Poker After Dark will shuffle up and deal on January 4th, with a ‘Commentators’ episode kicking off proceedings.
Poker After Dark may still play second fiddle to GSN’s High Stakes Poker in terms of television ratings, but the new season promises some mouth-watering clashes. Ali Nejad and the glamorous Leeann Tweeden will continue to front the show, but the former will be alongside Gabe Kaplan, Joe Sebok and Kara Scott in the poker hot-seat for the first episode.
Highlights of the new season will include Annette Obrestad’s appearance in ‘Nicknames week’, alongside Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow, Antonio ‘The Magician’ Esfandiari and Phil ‘The Unabomber’ Laak. The Scandinavian youngster gripped the WSOPE 2007 with her relentless aggression, and went on to scoop the coveted title. Phil Hellmuth, who was berated by Daniel Negreanu for his nitty, conservative style in the ‘Railbird Heaven’ cash game edition, will feature in several episodes. With both Matusow and Hellmuth at the table, tensions will no doubt run high.
The first seven episodes will adopt a traditional SnG, winner takes all format, and the remaining six will include $50k, $100k and $150k minimum buy-in cash games. The icing on the cake is the $150k min buy-in, season finale, which will feature Tom Dwan, Patrik Antonius, David Peat, Gabe Kaplan and Alan Meltzer. Poker fans will be eager to see more of David 'Viffer' Peat, who remains a bit of a high stakes enigma.
Poker purists will be critical of some of the more uninspiring line-ups. A few of the weeks adopt rather trivial themes, with the ‘He Said, She Said’, and ‘My Favourite Pro’ editions featuring several unknown names. The inclusion of Laak and Esfandiari, who detract from the poker with their annoying antics, may not go down too well amongst poker circles.
Regardless, the inclusion of Dwan, Antonius and fearless veteran Eli Elezra will serve to spice up the action. The episodes will appear on Pokertube.com in due course.