Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the entire internet for all the latest news in and around the world of poker. If it involves chips and cards, or people known to associate with chips and cards, we’re there.

A.J. Benza out as High Stakes Poker co-host

It took a while for confirmation of a sixth GSN season of the popular High Stakes Poker, and after a few weeks’ wait there’s now confirmation that co-host A.J. Benza won’t be coming back for the new season.

While Benza was derided by poker forum posters in the early days of HSP, the last few seasons have seen the audience warm up to him. So the obvious question here is, why change a formula that obviously works? On his blog, Benza says that he’s been shown the door so that HSP can bring in a female commentator (rumored to be poker pro Vanessa Rousso). Even though he offered to take a pay cut and appealed to the GSN executives as a father whose family depends on his income, Benza wasn’t able to make any headway with the network.

“I flat out told the guys who will remain unnamed - oh screw it was Bary Nugent and David Shiff - that if you got the best pizza in town for 5 seasons, why try and add licorice to it?” wrote Benza. “I also told them I am the guy who does my own publicity for the show because GSN has NEVER set up not even as much as a radio interview for me. So I scour internet poker sites and make myself available and - voila! - instant publicity.”

Benza’s post drew a few detailed comments from someone claiming to be a disgruntled insider at GSN, saying that the decision to replace Benza with a female was a decision made by a new executive at the network looking to put her own stamp on the show. Supposedly the execs also hope that a female commentator will draw more female viewers to HSP. I’ll leave it to you poker players to get your own read on how authentic these anonymous comments are.

“So no more High Stakes Poker without the kid,” Benza concluded. “I hope you like the female they toss in front of you. And I hope the repartee between she and Gabe works likes ours did. And look on the bright side: If she stinks…..I might be back for HSP 7.”

(A FLOP, A TURN, and a RIVER of SH*T - Benza…Neat)

New format boosts WSOP ratings for 2009

It looks like ESPN’s format change for this year’s WSOP coverage, which focuses in-depth on the Main Event rather than showing the final table of every $1,500 donkament on the schedule, is paying dividends. After 11 weeks of coverage the ratings for the 2009 WSOP on ESPN are up 11% across the board from last year’s shows, from a 0.82 average rating to a 0.92 average, with slightly higher boosts among key demographics. The WSOP’s share among males 18-49 is up 12% this year, while among males 25-54 the number has jumped 16%.

In the early going this year - that is, when the network was airing the special $40,000 No Limit Hold’em event and the Champions Invitational freeroll - things weren’t looking so good. But once the Main Event coverage rolled around things changed. By devoting more than 20 hours to the most prestigious tournament in the world, ESPN has simultaneously been able to get more famous players on the screen and provide a better representation of the circus atmosphere that the Main Event is known for. That has to make their advertisers, and by extension the executives at the network, very happy.

(WSOP on ESPN Ratings up 11% in 2009 - Poker News Daily)

McManus to eggheads: Teach more poker!

Positively Fifth Street author and 2000 WSOP Main Event final tablist Jim McManus has a good read in the Chronicle of Higher Education today in which he makes the case for using poker as a mainstream educational tool due to its prominence in America’s cultural history. After detailing how crucial poker was to 20th-century American presidents, how the game’s risk-taking nature ties in neatly with the history of our country, and how poker helped President Barack Obama and Bill Gates in their early careers (more for its social aspects, says McManus, than for its players’ ability to win big money playing the game), he makes note of the fact that its place in American culture is almost completely overlooked by the academy.

Writes Bad Jim:

The larger—and perhaps more surprising—pedagogical fact is that while poker has gone hand in hand with pivotal aspects of our national experience for a couple of centuries now, you’d never guess it from the curricula of our history, anthropology, and English departments, or even from browsing most dictionaries. The latest edition of the New Oxford American, for example, fails to include flop (as a poker term), hold ‘em, Omaha (as a game), and World Series of Poker. (Terms deemed fit to appear include floptical, holdall, Pokemon, and World Heritage Site.) Similar omissions occur in Merriam-Webster, thefreedictionary.com, encarta.msn.com, and other online lexicons. Such cultural blind spots persist in the face of poker’s expanding global popularity, as well as abundant evidence that the game has helped not only ordinary citizens but numerous movers and shakers make their way in the world.

It’s a shame that McManus’ own course on the history and literature of poker at the Art Institute of Chicago is such an anomaly in educational institutions. I know for a fact that I would’ve enjoyed and learned more from such a class than I did from 80% of the courses I took in college. Maybe this article will get some ivory-tower types thinking about a way to work implied tilt odds into their curricula - or at the very least, encourage a few of them to donate a few dollars of their ample salaries at the tables while they consider the game’s cultural significance.

(What Poker Can Teach Us - Chronicle of Higher Education)

Related posts:

1. DAILY BUZZ: Benza’s Next Move, WPT Marrakech, Poker In India Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the...
2. DAILY BUZZ: WSOP Numbers Steady, Yukon Ho, Social Media in Poker Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the...
3. Ratings Are In: WSOP Ratings Up Huge Over 2007 The November Nine experiment appears to have worked some magic...
4. DAILY BUZZ: Chicago Freerolling, Amazing Race, High Stakes Poker Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the...
5. DAILY BUZZ: High Stakes Poker, Vanessa Rousso on TV, Counterfeit Chips Welcome to the BLUFF Daily Buzz, where we scour the...