ESPN has long been in charge of broadcasting the World Series of Poker and 2009 is no exception to that rule. The television sports giant has once again been given the rights to broadcast their coverage of the World Series of Poker in 2009. When media kits were released just recently, it was discovered that ESPN had already created a schedule of their WSOP broadcasts. The schedule will cover four events out of the entire WSOP. July 28th will see the first WSOP 2009 episode air on ESPN and during that particular period of time they will be broadcasting the $40,000 No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em event. That broadcasting will continue over two hours and cover a summary of what happened in the event.

On August 4th, the second of the four events will start its broadcasting schedule. That event is the WSOP Champions Invitational and it will see many interesting poker champions like Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, Mike Matusow, and Mike Sexton, all of whom have had success at previous iterations of the tournament and some of whom will no doubt be back in order to take another shot at the WSOP ESPN 2009 Champions Invitational. A summary of that event will also be two hours.

August 11th will see ESPN take a sharp turn from previous years and broadcast the Ante Up for Africa tournament instead of previous years where they gave preference to the $50,000 HORSE tournament instead. Whether or not that move has anything to do with the general unpopularity of Scotty Nguyen’s victory last year is anybody’s guess.

Once all of those three events have been covered, the Main Event will kick off on August 18th, 2009. Two hours for each of the four starting days is scheduled in so that people can see the full width of the starting field. The Day 2A and 2B festivities will take place on September 15th and 22nd and will once again represent recaps of the events that took place on those days. This will go all the way through to November 10th at which point a recap of the Final Table will also be aired.

Since ESPN experienced a 50% rise in their ratings as a result of the decision to force the final nine participants to wait until November to play the table, they will be doing this again in 2009.