Poker an television might not originally have seemed easy bedfellows, but when Late Night Poker changed all that at the turn of the Millennium, it seemed like no-one could get enough of the card game that was transformed into a sport.

Which is where Celebrity Poker Club came in.

Spawned in 2003, a derivative of Late Night Poker featuring only celebrity players was thought to be a hugely popular idea at the time. Plenty of poker’s biggest names were becoming celebrities anyway, so why wait until we’d grown to love them when there were people out there we loved already who we could fit into a poker format.

Just like the U.S.A.’s attempt at this with Celebrity Poker Showdown, there were some issues with this. Chief amongst them was the content itself. What some producers and directors of the celebrity-based format didn’t get was that poker fans were – in the months following Chris Moneymaker’s legendary WSOP Main Event victory that summer – rapidly turning into poker players. As such, they were learning a vast amount about poker and knew a good bluff or a bad call when they saw them.