Felted

GSN has bowed to the government's asinine crusade to stop people from playing poker. Or maybe the network just realized High Stakes Poker was overexposed. Either way, the poker pros will get cut back to five hours Saturday night. GSN will also stop carrying Pokerstars advertising. It's so important that people not play poker online with their own money.

Hey, if we let them play poker, next thing you know, people might want freedom from government tyranny. Then we might have a revolution, all Ben Franklin and Sam Adams and whatnot. Okay, I'll get off my libertarian high horse. But jeez louise, who cares if people bet their own money at online poker sites?

The dadgummed guv'mint cares, that's who. Oh well, a cutback in High Stakes Poker was long overdue, anyway. The show has seen its numbers skid since it got splattered all over both weekend nights. In fact, HSP's days may be narrowly numbered at the old-skewing, female-skewing GSN. I always liked High Stakes Poker, thought it was one of the network's best originals. But it's enjoyed a good long run.

SLIGHTLY RELATED UPDATE: In other grim GSN news, Improv-a-Ganza crashed to its lowest first-run ratings ever on Wednesday, an embarrassing 193K viewers at 8:00PM. Sure, American Idol grabbed a lot of viewers in the hour, but this number is horrendous. I guess I don't have to worry about comedy shows taking over GSN.