Social, online players keep game thriving
Jan Edward Helfeld moves along the bar at the Hawk and Dove, a popular after-work watering hole on Capitol Hill, scanning his quarry.
He stops several people to ask: “Are you here for the poker meeting?”
Like others who have turned out, Helfeld is hungry to meet people who host or play in regular games he might join. He exchanges business cards with Jason Kim, who hosts a regular game for friends. They discuss stakes they like to wager and types of poker they like to play.
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Poker is on fire, its popularity fanned by a combination of television, technology and, for some, the allure of big money.
The game Mark Twain once complained was “unpardonably neglected” in the United States is now played by hundreds of thousands of people online 24 hours a day and by celebrities on television.
Industry estimates are that 50 million to 80 million Americans play the game. Card rooms in states where poker is legal are booming, and online directories list games and tournaments set up in garages and basements around the country. The game is consuming college campuses and has replaced video gaming as the idle-time obsession of many high school boys.
“It’s just amazing,” said Nancy Robinson of Arlington, Va., whose 16-year-old son, Nick, has been playing nearly every night this summer with 10 to 20 friends who bet about $10. “I’ve seen a lot less computer games” among her son’s circle of friends. “I certainly favor poker; it probably improves the mind more, and it’s much more social.”
Players at all levels say the game appeals to their competitive instincts, challenges their brains and differs from other sports because it does not rely on athletic prowess or the ability to buy the best equipment.
“Other games dictate to you,” said Kevin Wills, who is also at the meet-up hunting for a regular game. “With poker, you can control the game, by either bluffing, being overly aggressive or passive.”
Some big Hollywood names are smitten. Ben Affleck won $360,000 in a recent tournament in Sacramento, Calif. Mimi Rogers plays often, as do Lou Diamond Phillips and James Woods.
“Poker is like a modern Greek tragedy,” said Steve Lipscomb, chief executive of World Poker Tour Enterprises Inc., who pioneered the way poker is watched in the United States. “It reveals the human condition as well or better than anything else you’ll find. You get the greatest highs and the lowest lows. That’s the juice.”
But it is the growth of poker as a business that is breathtaking to people in the gaming industry.
Cable TV viewer ratings for the “World Poker Tour” on the Travel Channel and the World Series of Poker on ESPN have been so strong that four poker-related shows are in development.
The success of television and online poker has translated into a surge of entrants in tournaments. First prize in this year’s World Series of Poker, which took place in May and is now airing on television, doubled to $5 million because of the increase in participants. The top tournament prize of “World Poker Tour” jumped to $2.7 million from $1 million.
Poker had long been a late-night cable TV offering, but drew few viewers until three years ago when Lipscomb produced a documentary on poker.
Lipscomb realized that watching on television was unsatisfying because viewers rarely saw the players’ cards. In the most popular tournament game, Texas Hold ’em, every player has two cards that are dealt face down and are rarely revealed unless there is a showdown with another player at the end.
Lipscomb, borrowing from a British TV program, developed putting cameras in the rim of the table to show “hole cards” when each player looks at them. Viewers at home knew what cards the players had and could strategize along with them.
Lipscomb took the camera idea, and the notion of a more heavily edited, faster-paced and stylized program, to various cable TV outlets. The Travel Channel bit, and the “World Poker Tour” series was born.
“All of a sudden, poker became a cross between a game show and a reality show,” said Dan Goldman, vice president of marketing for Pokerstars.com, an online poker site. “It revealed strategies. People started saying, ‘I could do this, too.’ ” Although ESPN copied the camera idea and now televises the more well-known World Series of Poker, “World Poker Tour” Enterprises Inc. is growing rapidly, with tournaments in exotic locations and on cruise ships with million-dollar prize pools. Last month, the company began selling stock to the public, trading on the Nasdaq, and it has filed for a patent for its method of showing hole cards and odds for each hand.
In a recent 24-hour period, about $124 million was wagered in more than 100 online poker rooms.
Source: Jonathan Krim, The Washington Post
