What's the selection process for players on those televised Texas Hold Em Shows?

Question

Can anyone with cash who auditions be on.

How do they advertise for players?

And what is it like on the set of those things?

First and foremost, they are making a television show.

I have to believe that what I see is edited to some extent later?

Anyone have first hand knowledge of these kinds of things?

Answer 1

The players buy into a tournament.  You have to make the final table because usually its the final table that gets filmed.  However, there are some invitational tournaments where pros are invited to play.

Answer 2

It varies by the particular show you are watching and the particular tournament. Most of the shows that you see loaded with top pros (like Poker After Dark and the National Heads-Up Poker Championship) are invitational tournaments, where the show invites specific players in. These shows often have online or live satellite qualifying tournaments as well though, which is why you will often see one or two amateurs mixed in.

Most poker tournaments are open to anyone with the cash to buy in. The prime example of this is the World Series Of Poker. Bring the cash, and you're in.

Oh, and there is no "audition" to play. People with ugly mugs and boring personalities are perfectly welcome to enter the tournaments.

As far as advertising to get players goes, they don't need to do much. Most of the top pros have agents, so if it's an invitational, all they have to do is call up their agent and they're in. And if the Bellagio (or any other big casino) is having a big money tournament that they want to draw a lot of pros, all they have to do is put up a sign outside the poker room that says," $5,000 Buy in Tournament next Friday, final table broadcast on CBS" and they'll get all the players they need. And all of the large scale open tournaments that I know of are either directly affiliated with online poker sites, or online poker sites take it upon themselves to hold satellite tournaments to get in.

I've been to a couple different televised tournaments, and the setups were a little different. At the World Series of Poker, they basically have cameramen wandering around the first few days, trying to catch some decent action. If something big is about to happen (i.e., Phil Helmuth goes all in and gets called) the dealer will signal someone to bring a camera over, and he'll wait until they are there and set up to play out the hand. They will also have "featured" tables, where they will pick one out that has a few noteworthy pros (the players are divided randomly, so it's a luck of the draw kind of thing) and move them to a table with cameras set up around it and the small cameras in the table to see each of their hole cards.

At the National Heads Up Championship, it was a little more cozy environment. There was a small audience of people (maybe 100) in bleachers around the room, with all of the tables on the floor. Every table was set up with cameras, and there was an MC wandering around looking for big hands to call out. After a winner was declared at each table, all action was stopped while "exit" interviews were carried out with the two players who had just finished.

And yes, poker on TV is heavily edited. Big time tournaments take days to complete, so there's no way they could show the whole thing. Even at the Heads Up Championship, the matches could take a couple of hours depending on the players and how the cards came out.