Written by Sadonna | Sunday, April 24th, 2011

ESPN and the Fox network have been strong supporters of poker programming as well as advertising for many years now but now in the wake of the Black Friday arrests both networks have pull PokerStars programming from their airwaves.

Fox has taken both the Million Dollar Challenge and the PokerStars Big Game from their television schedule and ESPN have cancelled the North American Poker Tour shows as well as PokerStars advertising from their station.

A statement was released by ESPN about the recent arrests and their decision which read: “We are aware of the indictment only through what has been announced publicly. For the immediate future, we are making efforts to remove related advertising and programming pending further review.”

Also there has been a news report that ESPN has cancelled temporally the Onyx Cup which is a tournament series that Full Tilt Poker hosts. The event was supposed to take place in May but the event is supposedly cancelled due to Full Tilt Poker no longer being available to US players.

Despite these cancellations, it is believed that ESPN will still be showing coverage of the upcoming World Series of Poker. ESPN covers the event each year and airs footage for many months. However if the channel does cover the major poker event they will most likely not show any advertisements from the online poker rooms affected by Black Friday, both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.

Poker programming will definitely be limited in the US but on a brighter note the Game Show Network is still planning on broadcasting the High Stakes Poker show which is very popular among poker players and fans.

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