Lon and Norm have built up some critics over time, but what they brought to the product back then was fresh and exciting. They presented the action in an exciting manner, had slick production design (for the time), made use of poker's many wild characters, and overall just modernized the packaging of poker in a way that we hadn't quite seen.
Just watch the two broadcasts one after another. I will always argue that it wasn't really about Moneymaker so much as it was about online poker, WPT, and ESPN's hole card cam.Ĥ42 Productions took over the WSOP brand for the 2003 WSOP and there was a quantum leap in the entertainment value of the product.
