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Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008

The Poker Boom Part 1: Where it all began

Poker Table

By Jason Kirk

This is the first article in a six part series taking a look at the history of the poker boom, including how it began, how it has evolved over the years and where poker may be headed in the future. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the series on Friday.

When the "poker boom" started, conventional wisdom said it was a fad, a diversion people would abandon when something else new and shiny came along. Six years later, it's clear that poker's appeal was grossly underestimated.

One major indicator of the strength of poker as a North American cultural phenomenon is the prevalence of poker on television. Though its death knell has been rung many times by people inside and outside the game, televised poker is still going strong today.

Sure, plenty of niche programs have come and gone (Celebrity Poker Showdown, anyone?). But that's the nature of the television industry. The fact is, we've reached the point where there are now familiar programs that aren't going anywhere.

NBC has the annual National Heads-Up Invitational and Poker After Dark. ESPN has nonstop reruns of what sometimes feels like the last 412 years of the World Series of Poker. The Travel Channel has the World Poker Tour - until the show jumps ship at the end of the season for GSN, which is already home to High Stakes Poker.

If you'd bet that poker would be so omnipresent back in 2002, chances are that even the poker world's most devoted denizens would have given you pretty long odds.

ESPN had been airing one-hour specials from the WSOP final table on and off since the 1980s, while Fox Sports Net showed Late Night Poker, an import from Britain taped in a studio without an audience.

Those shows didn't have the sense of spectacle and drama that have become ingrained in today's televised poker. In some cases, they also lacked some of the basic on-screen information we take for granted today, such as graphics with the current blinds and pot size.

So how, given where poker was in 2002, did it reach its current heights? The trail goes back to two television shows from 2003.

A little lipstick goes a long way

Talk with World Poker Tour Enterprises CEO Steve Lipscomb, and you might get the impression that he thinks he is to poker what some will tell you Al Gore thinks he is to the Internet: the man who gave it to the world he loves so much.

While Lipscomb may not have invented the game, he did bring several things to the table in 2002 that hadn't previously been in play.

While the WPT wasn't the first poker show to reveal hole cards to its viewers - Late Night Poker got that down before the WPT existed by using cameras under glass plates built into the table - it was was, the first series to use the "lipstick cam," a tiny video camera built into the table in front of a player's seat.

The WPT's lipstick cams gave viewers the drama of watching a player peel his cards back to reveal a hand worth moving all-in on.


The WPT's crack commentating team.

Having information about the hole cards available made it possible to use a play-by-play and color announcer team - in this case, Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten - to give viewers insight into the strategic mind-set of a poker pro.

The presentation was in sharp contrast to poker shows that had come before it, making the WPT stand out to viewers.

They play poker in Costa Rica?

International players had been coming to the WSOP for years, but up until 2002, nobody had organized a tour to bring high-stakes tournaments to them. When the WPT came to town, the seeds of a burgeoning international poker scene were sown.

Though many of its events took place in the United States, the first season of the tour gave American viewers a glimpse of a wide world of poker that many of them had had no idea existed.

They discovered for the first time that players with names like Jose Rosenkrantz were playing poker in steamy Central America, that sunny Caribbean islands made for great gambling destinations, or that there were cruise ships plying international waters while their passengers were check-raising each other.

And now, a word from our sponsor

The WPT also served as a platform for online poker rooms to advertise their services to what had been up to then a mostly untapped market.

Two events from the WPT's first season were sponsored by online poker rooms UltimateBet and PartyPoker, neither of which was particularly well-known at the time. (It's worth noting that no WPT events today are sponsored by online poker rooms.)

Episodes of the WPT's first season shown in 2003 were regularly drawing 900,000 viewers a night despite the fact that the Travel Channel wasn't available in all areas. The audience would grow even larger on Super Bowl Sunday in 2004, when NBC broadcast the WPT's "Battle of the Champions" episode opposite the FOX network's Super Bowl pre-game show.

Despite the competition, the NBC broadcast drew an estimated 10 million viewers, who watched Ron Rose best five of the tour's first-season champs in a single-table tournament.

It's easy to speculate that the number of WPT viewers signing up for a PartyPoker account after seeing the show was substantial in relation to the number of players already logged in. The influx of new players helped give the site a reputation as home to some of the loosest poker games on the planet, a big factor in boosting the room's traffic over the next few years.

ESPN revisits the WSOP

The WPT wasn't alone in giving the world a new impression of poker in 2003. ESPN chose the same year to expand its annual coverage of the Main Event. Previous ESPN coverage, which had run on and off since 1988, had been limited to the final table and had never lasted more than two episodes.

In 2003, 10 episodes covered the Main Event in its entirety. Instead of only seeing the last stage, viewers were introduced to the entire scope of the tournament. Today's WSOP broadcasts feature preliminary bracelet event final tables in addition to coverage of the Main Event.

Much like the WPT, the new WSOP broadcast featured hole-card cams that gave viewers the information they needed to play armchair quarterback. Also present were the announcing duo of Lon MacEachern and Norman Chad. MacEachern had participated in the 2002 WSOP broadcast, but Chad (and his ex-wife jokes) was new to the show.

The two have since become fixtures of the network's WSOP coverage every year.

I wanna be a Moneymaker too


I am the Moneymaker.

While the expanded coverage of the WSOP was important to the growth of poker, the lasting impact on the game came from the man who emerged triumphant that year. Chris Moneymaker, an accountant and amateur online poker player from Tennessee, had a story that resonated with the masses.

Not only had he conquered an enormous tournament field of more experienced competition, but he had won his seat in an online satellite at PokerStars.

Moneymaker's improbable triumph over the largest field in WSOP history would prove to be an important catalyst in expanding the game beyond the realm of rounders and veterans.

The image of an amateur player decked out in his mirror shades and baseball cap, pumping two fistfuls of cash in the air, was powerful. It convinced every Average Joe in America that they, too, could pull off bluffs against the likes of Sammy Farha.

What the average person didn't have was the $10,000 to buy a seat at the table. Luckily, the online poker rooms were more than willing to help them find the cash to get in on the game.

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