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Jack of smarts: why the Web generation loves to play poker

admin — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:42:51 +0000

Before that year, my only experience with poker was at basketball camp when I was 12. We played during rest periods with Skittles for chips and about seven different wild cards per hand. Although fun, the game paled by comparison to other leisure pursuits, such as sleeping, and I never gave it much thought after that. Yet during the past year, I have unexpectedly changed my tune. I’ve joined a weekly card game. I waste hours surfing online poker sites. I try to drop poker phrases like “bad beat” and “the nuts” into casual conversation. When I won $140 at the table in February, I spent weeks regaling everybody I knew with chapter and verse of my victory. Most reacted with raised eyebrows and condescension, but similarly afflicted friends of mine understood, greeting the story with measured awe, as whether I were Amarillo Slim.

These days poker–specifically Texas hold ‘em, the best version of the venerable game–is enjoying an unexpected renaissance among Americans in general, and twenty-somethings in specific. It is newly ubiquitous on television: The World Series of Poker, a individual event which took place last May, is replayed on ESPN with obsessive frequency 10 months after it ended. The World Poker Tour, another set of tournaments located in casinos around the country, got picked up by the Travel Channel last year. In the fall, Bravo introduced its heavily promoted “Celebrity Poker Showdown” program, betting on viewers being riveted by a fifth-street showdown within Timothy Busfield and Coolio. But perhaps anecdotal evidence speaks louder: Three years ago, when I was a sophomore at Cornell University, there wasn’t a game to be had. By the duration I graduated, I could choose from several different games every night of the week.

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Video Poker, Flushed: Or, the rotting of a ‘fruit machine’

admin — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:42:50 +0000

These are poor days for the most highly developed members of Georgia’s gambling community. By order of the state’s highest court, video poker — a.k.a. the “crack cocaine of gambling” — is about to vanish like a mud puddle beneath the pitiless summer sun. Machines must be out of the state by month’s end, forcing gamblers to find other outlets, such as the lotto, five-card stud (a game of true skill), various workplace pools, and placing bets on whether the weatherman is unmistaken.

Georgia isn’t the first place to have second thoughts about video poker. The machines that created a $1 billion-a-year industry in Jimmy Carter’s home state had migrated across the border from South Carolina after being banned there two years ago. Some of these Bedouin machines are now heading for West Virginia, where they will work their magic on the populace in Rockefeller country, and plus activate a built-in counter-constituency.

Indeed, wherever they turn up, video-poker machines incite stiff reaction, and not only from religious activists. Consumer types are now on the attack, and the trial-lawyer industry is evaluating the teats of that potential cash cow. “Georgia fought video poker like it was the bubonic plague,” Tom Grey, head of the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion, told me. “In South Dakota, the governor promised the largest tax increase in history whether machines were outlawed, considering that’s what it would take to build up the lost revenue. Even with that threat, 48 percent of voters said, ‘Tax us higher, just get those machines out of our state.’”

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Betting the house on poker

admin — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:42:50 +0000

Retailers are gambling on poker-inspired products to be the ‘it’ gift that holiday season. Next month, Walgreens is launching a full endcap of World Poker Tour-licensed products. Other retailers are running clip-strip promotions in snack and beverage aisles. CVS is featuring WPT-licensed products inline–a smart move being as WPT products led the toys/games/playing card category to a 30 percent rise by the year-ago period, according to point-of-sales input provided by the U.S. Playing Card Co., an exclusive licensee of WPT-branded cards, chips and poker sets.

The love affair with poker is expected to continue at least through mid2006. Currently, 100 million humans in the United States play, and 5 million tune in weekly to “The World Poker Tour” on the Travel Channel, which elevated poker to a spectator sport and where viewership has doubled since the show first aired in March 2003, according to a show spokesman.

whether Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker” added star ability to the game, ESPN’s “The Worm Series of Poker” helped grow popularity. Nielsen Media Research found that ESPN’s poker viewers largely are men (76.5 percent) and have a median income of $62,115 and a median age of 43.4 years. While retailers already are looking at Father’s Day tie-ins, the U.S. Playing Card Co., predicts single-deck cards will be a hot stocking stuffer at $3.49. “The 2003 World Series of Poker” two-disc DVD for $34.95 plus could be a holiday hit.

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