America
Goes "All In"
By
Barbara Feiner
 |
Retailers couldn’t keep up with demand for
electronic card shufflers during the 2004
holiday season. The World Series of Poker’s
Wooden Pro Shuffle from Excalibur Electronics
is a favorite (retail price: $29.95). It works
with any standard deck of cards, includes a
card return tray, and offers push-button ease
for a quick and thorough shuffle. Get
it for only $21.88 at J&R Electronics Inc.
|
As
frenzied Christmas shoppers were in the final hours of
mall-crawling a few months ago, parents looking for
the perfect holiday gift were turning to
America’s latest-and-greatest pastime: Texas
Hold’em. At KB Toys, the nation's largest
mall-based specialty toy retailer, American Idol
Barbie and Hot Wheel AccelRacers were the top sellers
across the country—and neck-in-neck with another toy
aimed at kids 5 and older: a World Poker Tour
Plug-and-Play Game, with a joystick that plugs
directly into the TV.
When
the preschool set is hooked on Hold’em, it’s a
clear indication that poker mania has become a
recreational epidemic. Consider the following:
Excalibur
Electronics, which licenses World Series of Poker
games by Harrah’s Entertainment, could barely keep
up with demand for its handheld Texas Hold’em games,
electronic card shufflers, official WSOP chip sets and
tabletop accessories during the holidays.
“Our
electronic shufflers just exploded this last season,”
says
Excalibur President and CEO Shane Samole.
“Every day, a container of shufflers would come in,
and they were shipped out before they had a chance to
make it to our warehouse.”
Desperate
shoppers, who encountered empty shelves at stores,
wound up paying premium prices—up to three times
retail—on eBay.
Samole
can thank cable TV for his business windfall. From
Bravo’s popular “Celebrity Poker Showdown” to
The Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour events, Texas
Hold’em has become the “I Love Lucy” of gaming:
You can find a televised tournament at almost any time
of day or evening. “Showdown” launched its fifth
season on Jan. 25 (8 p.m. Thursdays EST) and “has
really jumped out for Bravo on Thursday nights—the
same way ‘Queer Eye’ put Bravo on everyone’s
radar screen on Tuesday nights last summer,” says
Lauren Zalaznick, network president.
She
has plenty of company among fellow broadcast execs.
ESPN launched “TILT,” a one-hour drama starring
actor Michael Madsen that debuted Jan. 13 (9 p.m.
Thursdays EST), complementing the network’s
regularly scheduled WSOP tournaments. The Game Show
Network boasts “Poker Royale:
Battle
of the Sexes” on Friday evenings (9 p.m. EST/PST).
E! is getting ready to air a new celebrity show, “Hollywood
Poker Night,” which invites viewers into celebrities’
home games. And the once obscure Travel Channel has
enjoyed a massive boost from its continuous coverage
of WPT events, hosted by poker pros Mike Sexton and
Vince Van Patten.
“When
you think about it, Mike and I teach poker to people
every Wednesday night on the show," says Van
Patten, who is now taking the show on the road with
Sexton for a series of World Poker Tour Boot Camps.
“At
WPT Boot Camp, we're going to take just 48 hours and
make you a new kind of poker player,” he says. “And
not only are we going to make you a good player, but
we're also going to teach you to enjoy the social
aspect of the game.” (You can sign up for the
two-day, $1,495 training course by clicking
here.)
And
the next generation of pros is already learning to
calculate pot odds and utter the phrase that has
captured
America
’s psyche: “All in.” High school and college
campuses across the country are home to social games
and university-sanctioned poker clubs.
“Obviously,
poker on TV has had a significant impact on the
popularity of poker on college campuses—although
here at Merrimack College, the drive to host poker
tournaments started before the advent of the World
Poker Tour’s arrival on The Travel Channel,” says
Michael Durkin, the North Andover, Massachusetts-based
university’s Poker Club adviser.
“Poker
is an exercise in a liberal-arts education,” he
explains. “To be a great player, you need math—specifically,
statistics. Card games, and poker first among
them, are a game of percentages. You also need to
have proficiency in communications, sociology and
psychology to read players—and to keep yourself from
being read. Finally, you need language
skills. Poker has a language of its own. To play
like a pro, you have to know the language.”
Who
knows? Maybe a bachelor’s degree in Professional
Poker isn’t far off.
__________________
About
Barbara Feiner:
Barbara Feiner is a Los Angeles-based journalist who
covers the poker world.
