On July 29, 2025, PokerGO and PokerStars announced that the National Heads-Up Poker Championship was coming back. The NBC show had been off the air since 2013. The new version kept the old idea, a single-elimination bracket of one-on-one matches, and raised the buy-in to $25,000, with four brackets named after the card suits and a best-of-three final. It would debut on Peacock in the autumn.
The quote in the announcement came from Francine Watson, Associate Director of Creative and Content at PokerStars. “Bringing back shows like the National Heads-Up Poker Championship is one of the most exciting ways to reignite interest in poker,” she said.
Most poker fans would not recognize her face. They would recognize her work.
From EastEnders to the European Poker Tour
Watson grew up in Berkshire, England, and wanted to work in television from her school years. She got her first taste of it early, working on the BBC soap EastEnders at 14. Her professional career began at Sky Sports and then at Sunset+Vine, the independent sports production company.
Poker arrived by chance. John Duthie, a poker player and television drama director who founded the European Poker Tour, approached Sunset+Vine about producing the new tour’s television coverage. Watson began working on EPT production around 2005, in the tour’s early seasons, when televised poker in Europe was still finding its format.
She then spent a period freelancing, producing World Series of Poker and North American Poker Tour content for 441 Productions, the company behind ESPN’s WSOP coverage of that era. When PokerStars built its own in-house production team, she joined it, having already worked on its content indirectly for years.
Twenty years of EPT television
The European Poker Tour is the backbone of her career. Watson has worked on EPT broadcasts for two decades, through changes of host cities, formats and technology, up to its recent stops in Barcelona.
Poker television has a specific problem to solve: hours of folds, a few big hands, and a final result viewers may already know. A good edit chooses which hands to show, builds the players into characters and keeps the hole-card graphics clear enough for a new viewer. If you are still learning the game, a well-produced broadcast is one of the easier ways to pick up the basic rules of Texas hold’em, because the graphics show both hands and the odds as the board runs out.
As Associate Director she now manages a team of about 30 people across design, production and digital content.
Shark Cage, KidPoker and Duel
Watson’s credits go well beyond tournament coverage.
- Shark Cage, a made-for-television PokerStars format built around poker personalities.
- The Big Game on Tour, a revival of the well-known PokerStars cash game show, taken on the road.
- KidPoker, the documentary about Daniel Negreanu, which she directed with Gary Davis, PokerStars’ head of creative, and which was acquired by Netflix.
- Duel, starring the Brazilian football stars Ronaldo and Neymar Jr, which drew millions of views.
- The Mystery Cash Challenge, and content for the PokerStars Open tour.
KidPoker is the best known of the list. Released in 2015, it followed Negreanu from his childhood in Toronto through his early years as a professional and into his time as the most recognizable PokerStars ambassador, and its sale to Netflix put a poker documentary in front of an audience that would never have searched for one.
The common thread is reach. Several of these were built to interest people who do not already watch poker, using famous names and familiar formats from sport and entertainment.
Industry Person of the Year
At the 2024 Global Poker Awards, Watson was named Industry Person of the Year. The other nominees were Matt Savage, the tournament director and Tournament Directors Association co-founder, Andy Wong and Gregory Chochon. Commentator Joe Stapleton, a long-time colleague from PokerStars broadcasts, had publicly campaigned for her nomination.
For a producer, the award was an unusual kind of recognition. Most industry honors in poker go to tournament directors, media personalities and executives whose names are on the screen. Asked in an interview with Cardplayer Lifestyle what she would tell others working behind the scenes, she said: “Keep on keeping on, take pride in your work, be confident in your value and surround yourself with good people.”
She also took the award onto the podcast circuit, appearing on the long-running Poker in the Ears with Marle Spragg, a fellow winner at the same Global Poker Awards, to talk about the work that rarely gets credited on screen.
The heads-up revival
The National Heads-Up Poker Championship carries real history. NBC first broadcast it in 2005, and Phil Hellmuth won that inaugural edition. The show ran until 2011, skipped 2012, returned for 2013 and then ended.
The 2025 revival brought a mix of professionals and celebrities: Liv Boeree, Shaun Deeb, Phil Galfond, Jason Koon, Michael Mizrachi, Chris Moneymaker, Doug Polk and Erik Seidel among the players, alongside names from television and sport such as Rob Mariano, Rob Riggle, Richard Seymour and Nick Wright. That blend, poker credibility on one side and mainstream recognition on the other, is the approach that runs through much of Watson’s work, from Duel to Shark Cage. (For the early history that set up televised poker in the first place, see the history of poker.)
The seeding for the new edition was drawn at random the day before play, and the show went to Peacock first, with rebroadcasts on PokerGO and PokerStars to follow. Twenty years after Watson’s first EPT shows, the bracket that NBC had dropped in 2013 was back on American screens.