In the latest of our series on the times poker has been on screen, we’re featuring a series dedicated to the might and majesty of the world’s greatest card game, Poker After Dark. Having run since 2007, Poker After Dark is one of the most popular series to ever cover the game and has returned to our screens in recent years on the PokerGO platform. What makes Poker After Dark so popular? Let’s take a look.

Poker has long been a game that was viewed as an underground pursuit, a card game played through cigar smoke. Though that all changed in one moment when Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, the dark set design and intimate player surroundings made for a show that, when originally broadcast on NBC in 2007, felt like a retrospective, a callback to a bygone age.

If you want to look back at the most recent series in 2019 and have an active subscription to PokerGO, then you can check out the recaps from that series right here.

The format could well have been swamped by the popularity of High Stakes Poker, a show that shares a resurrective existence with Poker After Dark on PokerGO in recent times. After all, High Stakes Poker had big cash games, big names and big pots. All three were also on Poker After Dark, but the cash game competition was added to by having a tournament edge to its ending, which lent other elements to the show’s style.