A new high-stakes cash game show is betting that the thing missing from poker broadcasts is not better commentary or bigger pots, but a live readout of the players' pulse. Deepstack, the episodic show fronted by high-stakes player Elton Tsang, is using AI-driven heart-rate monitoring to put a real-time biometric readout on screen next to each player — no wearables, no wires, just a camera pointed at a face.
Season one is currently shooting, with a release later in 2026.
How the technology works
The system is built on rPPG — remote photoplethysmography, developed in-house by Deepvision, Deepstack's sister technology company. rPPG extracts heart rate from video by detecting minute colour changes in the skin caused by blood flow. It requires no contact with the player at all.
The workflow runs in three stages: the system locks onto a player's face, reads the pulse from skin tone variation, then tracks heart rate continuously through the hand. The number appears on screen beside them.
PokerNews was given an exclusive first look using a real hand from the shoot. The board ran 7♠ 6♥ 5♥ 10♣ A♦. Tsang bluffed the river with K♣ 3♣ — king high. Wiktor Malinowski held K♦ 10♦ for second pair and went into the tank. His on-screen heart rate climbed as he thought. He folded.
That single hand is the entire pitch in miniature. The fold itself is unremarkable television. The rising pulse while he decides is not.
Why the show exists
Tsang's diagnosis of poker broadcasting is blunt.
"As a poker player, whenever I see poker streams now, they're very standardised. It's been the same for the past 15 years," he said. "Everybody tells me it's boring - they either fast forward or watch it on 1.5x speed. Nobody watches the whole thing."
That is a fair description of a real problem. Hole-card cameras were revolutionary in 1999 because they solved information asymmetry — the viewer suddenly knew more than the players. Nothing comparable has been added since. Production values have improved, stakes have inflated, but the fundamental viewing experience of a poker stream has been static for a decade and a half.
Deepstack's managing director Jelle Moene frames the biometric layer as the next step in that progression.
"I think by lifting up the curtain and showing what's going on behind the poker face, we'll extinguish or remove the boredom that people right now feel when they are watching a poker show," he said.
Moene also put the current state of the art in perspective: "We saw during the WSOP with face detection and the little rectangles… That's where we were two-and-a-half years ago. So where we're at now, I think it's already quite a big upgrade to what you were seeing."
Heart rate is only the first metric. Timing tells and blinking detection are in development. Moene describes the whole thing as "a technology layer" rather than a single feature.
Pre-edited, not streamed
One production decision distinguishes Deepstack from most modern poker content: it is pre-edited rather than live-streamed. That choice enables the overlays, dual-screen elements and short-form clips that a live feed makes difficult, and it lets the team build an episode as a piece of television rather than a recording of an evening.
"The first one we're going to take our time," Tsang said. "The product we want to create has a lot of dual-screen elements, which wouldn't be possible with streaming right now. We want to make sure it's good before we publish it. But in a matter of a few days, we've had so many big, interesting hands and some crazy, aggressive players."
The shoot is running three camera crews simultaneously while editors cut in parallel, with Moene sitting daily with the editing and production teams and, as he puts it, "tech guys upstairs developing in real time."
"It's safe to say that, if you have some creative minds around, you can really capture a lot at a poker table, which is right now not being captured," Moene said. "So far it's just working out great."
The show also incorporates the BLUVV game, described as a variant of Squid Game — a format element that suggests Deepstack is aiming at a broader entertainment audience than the existing poker-viewing population.
The questions nobody has answered yet
Several important details remain undisclosed: the distribution platform, the release date, and the stakes being played. Those matter. A show built on production sophistication needs a platform that supports dual-screen viewing, and a show built on capturing genuine tension needs stakes high enough that the tension is real.
There is also a legitimate integrity question that the coverage does not address. If a system can read a player's heart rate from a camera feed, the same technology could in principle be misused — by production staff, by anyone with feed access, or in a live setting. The pre-edited format and presumable broadcast delay mitigate this for Deepstack itself, but as rPPG becomes cheaper and more available, poker rooms will need a position on it. Contactless biometric reading of players is a capability the game has not previously had to write rules about.
Player consent is the obvious first line, and in a purpose-built show every participant has agreed to it. The harder version of the question arrives when someone points a phone at a live final table.
What this means for players
As a viewer, expect a genuinely different product. Whatever else is true, a heart-rate readout during a river decision gives the audience information the players do not have — the same structural trick that made hole-card cameras work. If it lands, expect every major broadcaster to copy it within two years.
As a player, assume tells are becoming machine-readable. The uncomfortable implication of rPPG is that physiological tells poker has treated as folklore for a century are now measurable. That cuts both ways: it may validate some traditional reads and demolish others. Our guide to poker tells covers what is currently known about live reads, and it is likely to need revising as this data accumulates.
Do not overcorrect. A raised heart rate during a tank tells you someone is under stress. It does not tell you whether they are stressed about bluffing or stressed about folding the best hand. Malinowski's pulse rose and he folded second pair — a correct-looking decision made under visible strain. Physiological arousal correlates with stakes, not with hand strength.
The real edge stays where it was. Broadcasts get more sophisticated; the game does not change. Ranges, position and pot odds decide results whether or not a camera is reading your pulse.
For more on where poker meets television, our poker on TV page tracks the current broadcast landscape, and the high stakes section covers the games these shows are drawing from.
Sources: PokerNews