The hottest hand around

All bets are on as Texas hold'em hits poker's popularity jackpot

By DANIEL J. VARGAS
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

David Thomas and a six-pack of his buddies are huddled around a green felt poker table. Chips are stacked high. Cold longnecks stand in cup holders.

James Nielsen / Special to the Chronicle

Travis Cherry, center, knows when to fold them as his friends Larry Laird II, left, and Josh Connelly look on. The 20-somethings get together every month for a night of poker as a way to catch up with one another. The games can sometimes last until the wee hours of the morning.

And Jimmy Newsom is raising the bet.

"He's easy to read," Thomas says. "If he raises, you know he's got a good hand.

"Never bluffs."

The players fold, except Thomas, despite his reliable intelligence.

"Jimmy, let's see it," says Tom Hicks. "Show-and-tell time."

He has a straight.

Thomas throws in his cards, and a reserved Newsom, a computer programmer, collects his winnings.

Thomas should have known better.

"If Jimmy's in, it's serious stuff," another player says.

It's just a Friday night with the guys, a few brews and nonstop hands of the trendiest poker game around, Texas hold'em. These 20-somethings are getting together, as they do every month, to relax, catch up with each other and maybe make a few bucks. The stakes are low - the guys buy in for $50. But pride runs high in Friday-night poker.

Thomas describes himself as a moderately competitive guy when it comes to playing cards. Hicks is a big bettor with a knack for losing. Josh Connelly, who drives in from College Station, is the voice of reason. And everyone knows Newsom plays with extreme caution.

Before the start of tonight's game, Hicks, a Rice University student, boasted he would rake in the dough. After an hour of play, he's lucky to have the shirt on his back. "It's a ploy," he says.

Of course, strategy.

The core members of the group - Thomas, Connelly, Newsom and Larry Laird II - have been playing for seven years, since their college days at Texas A&M. Back then, they used to play for nickels, dimes and quarters. How times have changed.

"Poker is taking the country by storm," Hicks says. "Even celebrities are playing poker."

Strangely, the trend is being driven by television.

Poker's popularity on cable television, from the Travel Channel to Fox Sports to Bravo, and among celebrities such as Ben Affleck is fueling renewed interest in the high-stakes card game, bringing it out of the smoky basement and into America's living rooms.

The key to televised success has been the technological ace of a table-level camera that allows viewers to see the players' face-down hole cards, adding voyeuristic drama to a static game.

And it's hitting a viewership jackpot. World Poker Tour is the most-watched program on the Travel Channel. During Super Bowl festivities in Houston, several hundred people showed up to watch football legends, socialites and poker champions play during a live version of Celebrity Poker Showdown, a popular Bravo TV show. And other networks are developing their own shows.

"I think everyone was a little shocked at the success of World Poker Tour," Phil Gordon, co-host of Celebrity Poker Showdown, says of the first show to incorporate mini cameras on the table. "The players always knew it was a compelling game. We just needed the right way to present it to viewers in a compelling format.

"Without that, watching poker is like watching grass grow."

A better image

Poker has had its degenerate undertones. As a pastime of the Wild West, it was a risk factor for early mortality. Wild Bill Hickok was hardly the first player shot in the back, though it was his last hand - two pairs, aces and eights - that came to be called "dead man's hand."

Today, an estimated 50 million Americans play poker recreationally, most of them sans six-shooter.

And what was once a wild-drinking saloon game is yielding to a more refined play of poker.

Gordon, who is a professional poker player, remembers people's reactions from five years ago when he would tell them what he did for a living. They'd say, "Yeah, right," as if anyone would really own up to such a lifestyle.

Now there's a fascination with poker players.

"It's becoming where the top players are viewed almost as professional athletes," with book and endorsement deals, Gordon says.

And like Michael Jordan, people want to be like their heroes.

In sports, he says, fans can't expect to take on top players like Tiger Woods or Andy Roddick and expect to beat them at their games. But in poker, it's not unrealistic.

If you're willing to put up the cash ($10,000) to land a spot in the World Series of Poker, you can compete against the top players in the country.

Associated Press

Chris Moneymaker of Spring Hill, Tenn., won the 2003 World Series of Poker as an amateur with no live tournament play under his belt, pocketing $2.5 million. Some poker players look to Moneymaker for inspiration, and hope they, too, can strike it rich.

Chris Moneymaker (his given name) won the 2003 World Series of Poker and its $2.5 million payout without previously playing a live hand. The accountant learned to play on a poker Web site, where he qualified for the tournament.

"It has inspired a whole league of armchair poker players to come take a shot," Gordon says. "And in reality, they can win."

Last year, the World Series of Poker had 839 participants. This year he expects 1,100.

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, would never have thought poker would be the new hip programming on television.

"I never thought poker was a good spectator sport," he says. "It's so uniquely not made for television."

But then again, in the 1980s America fell in love with a game show called The Joker's Wild, and that was essentially poker with cheesy sets, Thompson says.

"If nothing else, it's something completely different," Thompson says of today's poker programming.

Before the current genre of poker shows, he says, the only poker on television was in Westerns where one guy accuses the other of cheating and then shoots him.

The new shows, with their celebrity followers and poker commentators, give the game instant credibility. "It certainly mainstreams it," Thompson says. "It probably legitimizes it."

And it's bringing converts to casinos. In Mississippi, at Grand Casino Gulfport, owned by Caesar's Entertainment, participation in poker rooms is up at least 15 percent since July, says poker room manager Ted Vaughan.

"There's been a real surge, and it's still continuing," he says.

On Friday, Saturday and Monday nights, the casino's poker rooms have had waiting lists for the past month. The average wait time is about half an hour.

Interest has been so high that the casino offers free poker lessons daily. Every day, about 10 people learn the basics of poker, mostly Texas hold'em.

"That's what they see on TV," Vaughan says.

No-limit Texas hold'em

Among hundreds of versions of poker, the game of choice among pros and amateurs is both lightning-quick and tense. The outcome of a Texas hold'em hand rides on the flip of the final card.

"It's considered the most skillful and artful game of poker," Gordon says.

In Texas hold'em, each player is dealt two cards face-down, called pocket cards. After a round of betting, the dealer lays down three cards, called the flop, face-up. The flop is shared by everyone. Another round of betting follows, and then a fourth community card, known as the turn, is revealed. A third round of betting occurs, and the final and fifth card, the river, is turned over. After a last round of betting, the best hand (or a good bluff) wins the pot.

Shawn Pachlhofer, an engineer, has been playing Texas hold'em for about two years. Although he doesn't subscribe to cable, one of the guys he plays with doesn't miss a TV poker episode.

While the shows have increased poker's visibility, Pachlhofer believes they also give novices a false confidence.

"In some sense it hurts the game as well," he says. "They think they can go into a game, get in there and start winning.

"It doesn't work that way. There's a lot of talent to read cards and to read people."

Poker is part chance, part psychology and part theater.

"You have to bluff, and you have to read your opponent for weakness," Gordon says. "You learn the physical mannerisms that portray the strength of someone's hand. It's an unconscious thing they do."

In poker, that's called a "tell." For example, if someone looks directly at you as he makes a large bet, he probably has a weak hand; the stare-down was meant to fool you. If someone bets big and leans back, he probably has a strong hand, Gordon says.

Of course, the good players don't tell, or they tell a lie.

Pachlhofer says he's drawn by the challenge of outplaying a tableful of opponents. Even when a player beats him consistently, he doesn't mind. "The times you do beat them, you savor those moments," he says.

What's better than that?

"When you can bluff them out of a good hand," he says.

Legal issues

According to Texas statutes, poker games played in the home are generally legal. They begin to cross the line into illegal gambling when the host, or "the house," takes a cut.

"What's illegal is to run a casino out of your house and you're charging them to play in your game," Gordon says.

The law on Internet gambling, a skyrocketing industry, is less clear.

I. Nelson Rose, a gaming-law expert and professor at Whittier Law School in California, says the Department of Justice contends that the 1960s Wire Act, which prohibits using a wire-connection facility to place a bet across state lines, covers all betting. But a recent court decision says the law applies only to sports betting and races, such as dog racing.

"The short answer is that there is no federal law that would apply to a mere bettor," he says, although gambling operators may get into trouble.

Rose, who discusses these issues on his Web site, www.gamblingandthelaw.com, says half of U.S. states have "ancient" laws that make it illegal to make any kind of bet, but they are almost never used. And the federal government's interest in gambling is limited to organized crime, he says, so it's unlikely to go after private individuals.

The number of U.S. Internet gamblers more than doubled in 1998 alone, from 6.9 million to 14.5 million, according to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission Report. Revenues also doubled that year, from $300 million to $681 million. They are now estimated to be several billion dollars a year.

"It's exploding, absolutely exploding," Gordon says.

When Gordon recently played online, 20,000 other people were playing simultaneously. "Imagine a card table with 10 people each. That's 2,000 tables playing at the same time," he says.

You can play 100 hands online in an hour, Gordon says, compared to 30 hands live.

Another attraction: "You can play under an alias, and no one knows it's you," he says.

Good times, friends

Russel Garrison plays one Friday a month with friends from his softball team. Rotating homes, they gather around the dining or kitchen table to play five-card stud, five-card draw or a variation of Texas hold'em, for loose change.

No one lights up a cigar. The only cigarette smoker goes outside to light up. Some drink beer. Pizza is often on the menu.

Some other nights, Garrison watches the World Series of Poker and Celebrity Poker Showdown. "It's getting pretty famous now," he says of the game. "I think it's kind of cool."

The 39-year-old accountant loves the competitiveness, the excitement of getting a great hand on the last card or of raking in the chips after being nearly broke. The biggest rush is bluffing.

But probably the best part is, he says, is being "with the guys."

His poker buddies have dubbed him Rain Man because of his ability to calculate the odds of card combinations.

His partner doesn't play. Nor do the other guys' partners or wives.

"All the other halves understand," Garrison says.

They must be pretty understanding people, considering that the guys sometimes play six hours straight, into the early morning.

No longer men-only

On the TV show Whoopi, the star and her gal friends routinely get together for an all-female poker night where they talk about men, sex and menstrual issues while puffing away on cigarettes. Hardly the vision you get when you think of poker. But poker is no longer just a manly man's kind of game.

Celebrity Poker Showdown, one of several cable TV shows that feature poker, was recently renewed by Bravo for a second season, which will air in the spring. The show's hosts are Phil Gordon, left, a professional poker player who does commentary, and actor Kevin Pollak.

World Poker Tour has aired a "Ladies Night" episode featuring only female players. And actress Nicole Sullivan recently was crowned the first Celebrity Poker Showdown champion, beating four men.

"The ones I know are very good," Pachlhofer says of women players. "They're rather intimidating sometimes."

Annie Duke, probably the best-known female poker player in the world, has not yet made it into the top ranks of professional poker, but participation by women has increased significantly, Gordon says.

"It's not traditionally a woman's thing to do, but there are certainly great women players out there," he says. "There's no reason they can't be the best players in the world."

A Houston player named Cheryl, who asked that her last name be withheld, plays weekly with about 15 people, about one-fourth of them women.

"There is a sense out there that women can't play poker, and we're out there proving them wrong," she says.

No woman has won the World Series of Poker, and only one has made it to the final table.

"If I don't win," Gordon says of the upcoming 2004 tournament, "I want a woman to win."

Late hours

By 11 p.m., Hicks has lost close to $200.

"I'm way too intense about poker," he says. "I should quit."

Laird lends him $40 so he can stay in the game. That's what poker pals do.

Hicks makes a mild comeback, paying back the loan with chips to spare.

By midnight, he's making another bold prediction: that he'll beat the others in a Texas hold'em elimination tournament and be the last man sitting, flanked by stacks of poker chips.

However, Hicks is the third guy to bow out, after a high-stakes bluff that didn't fool anyone. Travis Cherry, the quietest guy at the table, takes the pot.

At 2 a.m., it's time to break up the party.

Until next month.

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