Friday, November 13, 2009

Kara Scott replaces AJ Benza on for HSP 6

 

Filming for the 6th season of High Stakes Poker ends today.  There are a few changes that will be noticed right away.  For one the producers finally realized that the best poker players in the world are not the old curmudgeons that were basically their gold buddies.  Tom Dwan's performance last year saw to that, so you are going to see a lot more "young guns" and a rare appearance from Phil Ivey. In addition the event is being sponsored by PokerStars, it will be interesting to see what implications this has on the show being available on the internet, last year was plagued by indecision from the shows producers, early in the season they mentioned they would have all of the shows available online.  Apparently they not only changed their mind but the person that was in charge of uploading the videos to the GSN channel on Youtube got into several very immature arguments with users.

AJ Benza is gone

If you would have said this after year one you would have gotten yelps of joy from everyone in poker.  Over the years though AJ became part of the poker community and upon his announcement that he was being replaced people began petitioning GSN to bring him back.  This move appears to be the result of the PokerStars sponsorship because his replacement is Kara Scott (she is sponsored by PokerStars).  It will be very interesting to see how PokerStar's influence will affect the dynamics of the show because most people in and out of poker were happy with it the way it was.

Kara Scott is his replacememt

The new co-host will function in a different role than AJ Benza, gone will be the back and forth banter with interviews from the players replacing that back and forth, similar to the way Poker After Dark works.

Here is a short list of the players you will see beginning on February 14th

 

Patrik Antonius

David Benyamine

Doyle Brunson

Tom Dwan

Eli Elezra

Antonio Esfandiari

Sammy George

Barry Greenstein

Phil Hellmuth

Andreas Hoivold

Phil Ivey

Mike Matusow

Allan Meltzer

Daniel Negreanu

Dennis Phillips

Lex Veldhuis

Yevgeniy Timoshenko

 

Two notable omissions from this list are Sammy Farha and Phil Laak.  This is Sammy's second season missing and it is anyone's guess as to why, Sammy was probably the most entertaining player to watch in virtually every show he was on in the first four seasons.  While most people have never liked Phil Laak's antics his interplay with Antonio Esfandiari was always classic in my book.  I also think that more casual fans appreciated him at the table.

 

Tags: season   hsp   six  

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