During Hurricane Frances, Ryan Gabner got together with some buddies for an extended poker match.
A few weeks before, he parlayed $50 into $1,200 playing online poker. And once a week -- sometimes more -- Gabner makes his way to the Seminole Hard Rock & Casino in Hollywood for a few hours of cards.
"I usually spend about $40 and I usually come out with money," says Gabner, emphasis on usually.
The Pembroke Pines 20-year-old has been playing poker for three years. He figures he plays every day: online, with friends or at the Hard Rock.
And like thousands of other twentysomethings, Gabner is a poker convert.
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No two hands are the same, says Gabner, who parks cars part time at the Office Depot Center while studying to become a firefighter. "It's always changing. I realize that it's hard to win money at the casino. You just have to be lucky and you just have to go there to have fun."
Until a few years ago, poker was a game played by seniors, most of them men.
Not any more.
Poker is hot. The Seminole Hard Rock Casino opened just five months ago but is already expanding its poker room from 40 to 48 tables, to accommodate about 430 players. That should ease the hourlong waits on weekend nights, when this new breed of younger players is most likely to play. Several day cruises also offer poker. One of them, St. Tropez Casino Cruises, which sails out of Port Everglades seven days a week, is doubling its poker-playing capacity. Dog and horse tracks as well as jai alai frontons have featured poker rooms since 1997, and many days, there are more people in the poker room than the stands.
There's also been an explosion online as well, with more than 200 poker sites now up and running, according to pokerpulse.com, which tracks online wagers. One day last week, the site noted that more than $119 million had been wagered in the previous 24 hours. Six years ago, online poker didn't even exist.
What's up with poker?
Blame the resurgence on something called the lipstick camera, a tiny gadget that allowed the game to be televised. The cameras reveal the cards players hold. The technology debuted in March 2003 when the Travel Channel first began televising poker.
"If you watch poker being played without knowing which cards the players hold, it's like watching paint dry," says Lee Jones, poker manager of pokerstar.com and author of Winning Low Limit Hold'em (Conjelco, $24.95). His book was first published in 1994, but in the past year he's sold more copies in several two-week periods than he sold in entire years in the mid-'90s.
"Now that you know what the cards are, you're practically sitting in the seat with the player. You can see what his choices are and you know what the right choice is," says Jones. "You're omniscient. You know more than either player does at this point."
The camera was invented by filmmaker Steve Lipscomb, who'd been asked to do a documentary on the World Series of Poker by TV's The Discovery Channel. In the process of the documentary, Lipscomb conceived of the World Poker Tour, putting 14 tournaments under one banner. Along with the lipstick camera, he used explanatory graphics, a multitude of cameras and expert commentary. For the first time, poker was packaged to tell a story and build to a climax. Lipscomb then convinced the Travel Channel to give him two hours of prime time. Ratings were three times higher than the Travel Channel had ever seen and only increased when the tour was repeated.
Suddenly, poker had its own superstars. And the game's fate was sealed when Bravo began televising Celebrity Poker Showdown, where famous folks such as Ben Affleck, Martin Sheen and Wanda Sykes got to show off their card-playing prowess and win money for the charity of their choice.
"I started watching poker on TV and just kind of thought it was a good game for me to get into and I started playing," says Sam Michels, a bank teller from Miami who was celebrating his 23rd birthday one afternoon earlier this month at the Hard Rock Casino. "The only place I play is here."
Michels isn't a gambler. He's never been to Vegas or Atlantic City. But he's watched enough TV poker to have a favorite player. His name is Phil Ivey, often referred to as the Tiger Woods of poker.
"He's also young and he seem to have the same interests that I have," says Michels.
Poker also has a Horatio Alger: His real name is Chris Moneymaker, and he's an accountant from Nashville. He won the 2003 World Series of Poker and $2.5 million with just a $40 investment. Moneymaker was a neophyte who had only played poker online.
"Poker gets your adrenalin pumping," says Michels. "It's a good way to get your adrenalin pumping in a legal sense."
Michels' parents approve. "For Christmas they bought me a poker set with everything in it: cards, chips. But I don't play as much as I'd like to at home."
Wil Herrera, director of poker operations at the Hard Rock, started his poker career 12 years ago as a dealer at the Miccosukee Casino.
"TV really brought poker to a whole new market, people who really didn't care about poker, didn't think it was interesting," says Herrera, 34. "They really enjoyed watching it on TV and now they come out here and they have the opportunity to try the same things that they see the professionals doing. It really has opened up a whole new market. You've got people all the way from 18 to 80."
Until recently, casinos were removing poker rooms instead of adding them, says Dave Schwartz, coordinator of the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond (Routledge, $24.95).
"It's interesting because it's not a bank game where the player plays against the house," he says. "The casinos just take a portion of the pot to defray the expenses of the room and to pay the dealer. They really don't make much money at all."
But poker is the only legal table game in Florida's Indian-run casinos. There are $2 limits on bets, but in poker tournaments -- where non-cash value chips are used -- bets are unlimited.
Schwartz says poker's beginnings are unclear, but by the mid-19th century, it was being played on Mississippi riverboats and then in the Wild West.
"[President] Nixon was apparently a master poker player, which is probably no surprise," says Schwartz. "Harry Truman's famous line `The buck stops here!' is a poker saying."
Players used to pass a hunting knife known as a buck knife to indicate who was dealing. "When Harry Truman said the buck stops here, he meant there is where I'm not going to pass the buck. I'm going to take care of things. I'm going to deal."
More recently during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States issued a set of playing cards identifying the most wanted members of the Hussein government. The ace of spades pictured Saddam Hussein himself: the war on terror expressed in poker terms.
Several different poker games are played in casinos and online, but it's Texas Hold'em that has the biggest hold on young players. Each player is dealt two cards face down. Players then bet before three shared cards known as the flop are dealt face up. Players bet again. Two more shared cards are dealt, one at a time, with more betting. The player with the best five-card hand from the seven cards wins.
But more than winning, the new breed of poker players seem to see the game as an entertaining way to pass time. Like a video game, poker is just something to do.
"I like to win," says Justin Growick, 21, of Pembroke Pines, a weekly player at the Hard Rock. "But I also like the thrill of just being here."
Source: John Tanasychuk, Sun Sentinel
