Poker is a winning hand in South Florida casinos, on television and online. The newfound popularity comes thanks to an innovative TV producer and a catchy game called Texas Hold 'Em.
Channel-surfing one evening, Jordan Mendell paused on the Travel Channel, mesmerized by a group of men sitting around a table and playing poker. His wife descended the stairs and joined him, angling for the remote.
''The channel never changed,'' Courtney Mendell said.
A few months later, awaiting their first formal session of Texas Hold 'em at a jai-alai fronton in Dania Beach, the Mendells embraced South Florida's newfound passion for poker.
Veteran players say the poker craze began with the debut, a year ago, of a television program called World Poker Tour on the cable travel network. Four hundred thousand viewers tuned in. During the two-hour broadcast, the program, with its smoke generators and inventive camera angles, ensnared another 400,000.
''People were tooling around, trying to find something to watch on television, and they hit our show and they stayed,'' said Steve Lipscomb, creator of World Poker Tour.
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Lipscomb recently assembled a Battle of Champions -- a contest among winners of previous tournaments -- for NBC to broadcast opposite the Super Bowl pregame show, the first such program on network television. It drew more than three million viewers, the largest modern audience to watch a poker game, Libscomb said.
Now, World Poker Tour and its imitators -- with colorful players, million-dollar purses and cameras that show viewers cards the players cannot see -- has swelled interest in the old-timey game, according to managers of card rooms and online poker sites.
Visits to www.pokerstars.com have more than doubled in the past year, according to site marketing manager Rich Korbin. Sales of books devoted to poker have spiked, according to Steve Radulovich, editor in chief of Card Player magazine. And at a reinvigorated Dania Jai-Alai, receptionists now answer the phone this way: Dania poker, ponies and jai-alai.
Nearby at Hollywood Greyhound Track, a hundred players filled 12 tables on a recent Monday evening, most playing the Texan game popularized on television. Sweat pants and sport shirts mixed with fedoras and basketball jerseys. Ages spanned five decades.
A dollar a holler, a dealer cried as he dealt a hand. One if you do, none if you don't. Possible flush over hee-yah.
Waiting in the wings: Gary Bickford, 38, a chef from Hollywood returning to the game after rereading the books and practicing online. Internet poker, he sneered, is nothing like the real thing.
''Poker is not playing cards,'' Bickford said. ``Poker is playing people who play cards.''
HIGHER STAKES
The poker trend is perfectly timed. A new state law last summer raised the stakes on poker hands in the moribund card rooms at struggling parimutuel tracks and frontons by removing a $10-a-hand pot limit. A new radio show, the first in the region devoted to poker, debuted around the same time with two real-estate lawyers as hosts. The Poker Guys airs Sunday mornings on WRFX-AM (940).
State revenue from poker in the fiscal year that ends June 30 will reach about four times the sum raised the previous year. Florida collected $921,000 in taxes and fees in the first eight months of the fiscal cycle, compared with $351,000 in all of fiscal 2003, according to the Florida Division of Parimutuel Wagering.
Floating casinos and Indian tribes, too, report a bustling business in poker. Insiders speak of a thriving poker underground: small rooms, scattered around Miami-Dade and Broward counties, hosting invitation-only events of questionable legality.
And poker seems to be reviving a tradition lost since the Kennedy era: playing cards at home.
Courtney Mendell, a Miramar native now living in Denver, started a coed poker group with her husband and their friends: Texas Hold 'Em, just like on TV. She's a spa skin specialist. He's a computer programmer. Rounding out their group are an engineer, a massage-therapy student and a rental-car manager.
After playing for small sums at home, the Mendells paid their first visit to a real card room, at Dania Jai-Alai, last week while on vacation.
Sitting at the bar nearby were Chuck Huston, a cable-TV worker, and Doug Partiss, a mechanic, both from Sunrise. Partiss got hooked on Internet poker, Huston on World Poker Tour. Both were approaching the green felt tables for the first time.
''If you can't see the sap sitting at the table, you're probably it,'' Partiss joked, assessing his chances.
DIFFERENT CROWD
Once associated with smoky taverns, firearms and cheats, poker now attracts sober young entrepreneurs, men and women weaned on home computers or in games with Grandpa, sipping spring water as they compete in softly lit, nationally televised showdowns. There is no smoking. Bad language draws a 20-minute suspension from the table.
Televised poker of the past was ''like watching bears hibernate,'' said James McManus, author of the best-selling poker account Positively Fifth Street.
Lipscomb, creator of World Poker Tour, transformed the game by installing tiny, patented ''lipstick cameras'' -- they look like lipstick tubes -- around the edge of the table to transmit images of the face-down cards as each player sees them. As a result, viewers know what each player is holding and the potential million-dollar consequences of every move.
''Sometimes the guy with the better hand folds, and that blows me away,'' said Huston, the Sunrise man.
Some top players can't stand having their cards, and their bluffs, broadcast to the world. Rivals could conceivably study videotapes to hunt for ''tells,'' or minute gestures that betray a player's hand. In regular poker, by contrast, players often win the pot without ever showing their cards.
''There are players who are playing in these major world poker events who do not like the idea at all,'' said Radulovich, whose magazine is based in Las Vegas. ``They are showing how they play to the world.''
Lipscomb counts on full disclosure of the cards to create drama in his program. In Texas Hold 'Em, each player gets two cards facedown and then makes a series of bets as five ''community cards'' are dealt, face-up, at the center of the table.
Each player's two ''hole'' cards are known only to the player, a single camera operator and a million television viewers.
''It's almost like Greek tragedy,'' Lipscomb said. 'You can watch them heading toward the cliff, and there's nothing you can do to stop them. Interactive television doesn't get any better than people sitting at bars, yelling, `Don't do it!' ''
Source: Daniel de Vise, The Miami Herald
