The World Series of Poker Is Back on ESPN — Here’s the New Deal
WSOP and ESPN just announced a landmark multi-year broadcast deal, bringing poker's biggest event back to primetime TV starting July 2026 with a live final table, 100+ hours of coverage, and production by the team behind the ManningCast.
Poker is coming back to primetime. On March 26, 2026, the World Series of Poker and ESPN announced a landmark multi-year agreement that returns the WSOP Main Event to the network that helped spark the global poker boom — and this time, it’s bringing a live finale, wall-to-wall coverage, and a production company known for reinventing how sports are watched. For poker fans who lived through the Moneymaker era, this announcement hits different.
What the Deal Actually Includes
The agreement covers comprehensive coverage of the $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em World Championship — the WSOP Main Event — across ESPN’s platforms beginning in 2026. Coverage kicks off July 2 with Day 1A of the Main Event and runs through the field thinning to a final table on July 13. Each tournament day receives a minimum of six hours of programming, and the entire package adds up to approximately 100 hours of original content per year.
The headline feature is a live, three-night finale airing August 3–5 on linear ESPN, from 9 PM to midnight EST. Once the final table is set on July 13, play pauses. The surviving finalists sit on their chip stacks for 20 days while ESPN fills primetime with curated highlight packages, player profiles, and hand-history analysis designed to build anticipation. Then the cameras come back on live. It’s a deliberate callback to the “November Nine” format the WSOP used from 2008 to 2016, which generated months of hype and turned final table players into recognizable figures before a single card was dealt.
Why WSOP Left ESPN and What Brought It Back
ESPN and the WSOP had a relationship going back to 1987, when the network first broadcast the Main Event and helped introduce serious poker to a national audience. The partnership deepened during the early-2000s poker boom — the era of hole-card cameras, Chris Moneymaker, and ESPN’s iconic Main Event coverage that turned casual fans into grinders. But the relationship frayed over time.
In 2021, the WSOP announced it was moving coverage to CBS and CBS Sports Network. In subsequent years, much of the content shifted to PokerGO, the subscription streaming service. For casual fans who weren’t willing to pay for a dedicated poker app, the Main Event became largely invisible.
What changed is ownership. In 2024, NSUS Group — the parent company of GGPoker, the world’s largest online poker room — acquired the WSOP brand for $500 million. The new ownership came in with a clear mandate: mainstream growth. A deal with ESPN, the broadest sports media platform in the U.S., was the obvious move. WSOP CEO Ty Stewart was blunt about it: “Returning to ESPN — the home of our most iconic moments since 1987 — allows us to showcase the human drama of the Main Event like never before.”
The Production Upgrade That Should Excite You
The production company behind the new broadcasts is Omaha Productions — Peyton Manning’s media company, which also counts Eli Manning as a partner. Omaha is responsible for the ManningCast, ESPN’s celebrated alternate Monday Night Football broadcast that redefined how sports television can feel. They’ve also produced Netflix’s Quarterback, Receiver, and other sports docuseries that prioritize storytelling over highlight reels.
That’s a significant upgrade from traditional poker broadcasting, which has historically leaned on standard commentary and hole-card reveals. Applying the Omaha lens — intimate athlete access, character-driven narrative, editorial ambition — to the WSOP final table could genuinely change how non-poker fans experience the tournament. ESPN VP Ashley O’Connor said the network was “excited to showcase the intensity and unpredictability of this tournament.” When the production team is the same group that made football more entertaining by mic’ing up Hall of Famers, that’s not a throwaway line.
What This Means for Poker’s Mainstream Moment
The 2025 WSOP Main Event set records: 9,735 players, a $90.5 million prize pool, and a $10 million first-place payday won by Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi for his eighth bracelet. The 2026 field will be announced, and with ESPN’s promotional muscle behind it, expect another surge in entries. When poker is on ESPN, people sign up to play.
The mainstream appeal matters because poker occupies a unique space in the gambling ecosystem. It’s a skill game with a competitive community, a spectator sport with an engaged broadcast history, and a lifestyle brand with global reach. A WSOP return to primetime pushes poker back into living rooms, barbershops, and sports bars — places it hasn’t been reliably visible since the mid-2000s golden era.
The Betting Angle
For sportsbook customers, WSOP prop markets are a legitimate and growing category. Most major operators — DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM — offer futures on the Main Event winner during the tournament run, with live in-play options as the field collapses. The 20-day pause between final table formation and the live broadcast creates a unique betting window: odds will be set based on chip counts and public perception of each finalist, but the cards haven’t been dealt yet.
Expect the betting interest around the 2026 WSOP Main Event to be meaningfully higher than recent years, driven by ESPN’s promotional reach and the buzz a live primetime finale generates. When 100 hours of poker content runs on the same network that airs the NFL and College Football Playoff, the audience — and the betting handle — follows.
Poker is back. July 2 can’t come fast enough.