The first two highlight shows from the 2026 WSOP Main Event aired on ESPN on Tuesday night. If you’ve been following along this summer, you might be sick of hearing about “ESPN returning to the WSOP!” but getting poker back onto primetime TV is long overdue. We all want a new poker boom. It’s not going to happen without mainstream interest.
Here's the kicker: very little poker makes it onto primetime TV. The Main Event took 12 days to play down to the final nine, with each day running for around 12 hours, including breaks.
ESPN has condensed these 12 days into four one-hour episodes. The first two aired last night, with Episode 1 covering all four Day 1 flights and Episode 2 covering both Day 2s. Blink and you'll miss it. Episodes 3 and 4 will cover Days 3-8 and air next Tuesday, July 27, starting at 9pm on ESPN2.
Old-school ESPN vibes return
There's plenty to like: the nod to the past with the bluesy slide-guitar jingle, a mix of old faces (Scotty Nguyen, baby!) and new (Martin Kabrhel gets just enough airtime to make you want more), and the comforting voices of Norman Chad and Lon McEachern.
The commentary is pitch-perfect for a mainstream crowd. Ali Nejad and Nick Schulman get a look-in but their brief commentary segments feel disjointed and don’t do them justice. ESPN didn't use their commentary for one of the big featured hands between Alex Foxen and Vinh Nguyen – perhaps because they joked several times about Nguyen's beer and hinted that it, along with a few others, may have contributed to his exit. It's a shame, because it was hilarious. But hey, kids, don't drink and gamble, right?
Nejad and Schulman remain poker's best livestream commentary team. Chad and McEachern are perfect for the mainstream.
That's the biggest difference from the livestreams. You could watch Episode 1 and never realise there were four starting flights in the Main Event. You don’t see chip-count graphics across the top of the screen. You don't know what the blinds are. And you don’t get any serious hand analysis across the 15 or so hands that are shown across the first hour. If you want that, you can re-watch the old livestreams.
This is more about the characters: Jourdan Baptiste getting the better of Jamie Gold by being a ‘better Jamie Gold’. Alex Foxen as an assassin with a smile, hoovering up chips from everyone in his orbit. Jimmy D'Ambrosio turning his table into a party, complete with Brit David Welch breaking into disco dancing. (Welch wasn’t body-popping when D'Ambrosio knocked him out by calling an all-in with “69 baby!”) You saw more from Jesse Lonis on the football field than you ever should – and precious little from him at the poker table. You even saw Chris Moneymaker beating Michael Mizrachi at pickleball.
We want more from ESPN
By the end of Episode 2, you heard D'Ambrosio toast his table with “Best friends forever!” and you know that Kristen Foxen survived to play another day, but you don’t know how many players are left in or who the chip leaders are.
That's not a criticism, just an observation. My only real criticism would be this: It’s not enough. I want an hour for each of the 12 days. Even though I know what happens, I’d watch it all over again, trusting Omaha Productions to chop it up into a different remix of the tournament I sat through for over 100 hours in Las Vegas.
We might even have had time for stories like Sasha Liu running her stack up to 10 times its starting size in just two levels on Day 2. Or Amit Agarwal, who played like a maniac but kept disappearing to watch a movie.
For the mainstream, it’s a perfect introduction to poker. Wags from Billions was playing. Look! It's soccer star Gerard Piqué. Men, women, old, young, extroverts, introverts, pros and wannabes were all playing together. They all seemed to be having a great time. Everyone was laughing. Even players who were knocked out seemed to be having a good time.
If I wasn’t into poker, I’d want to be after watching this. And that’s about the best thing anyone could say about the Main Event on ESPN. Bring on Episodes 3 and 4, which should be much easier to follow with the whole field together and genuine storylines beginning to emerge. And bring on the live final table, set to be streamed on ESPN2 and ESPN.
The only real complaint? Four hours isn't enough. Let's have more next year.
Episodes 1 and 2 of ESPN's 2026 WSOP Main Event are available to watch on demand. Episodes 3 and 4 air on ESPN2 next Tuesday, July 27, from 9pm ET.
Additional image courtesy of WSOP.
