"Poker is like a modern Greek tragedy," said Steve Lipscomb, chief executive of World Poker Tour Enterprises Inc., who pioneered the way poker is watched in the United States. "It reveals the human condition as well or better than anything else you'll find. You get the greatest highs and the lowest lows. That's the juice."
But it is the growth of poker as a business that is breathtaking to people in the gaming industry.
Cable TV viewer ratings for the "World Poker Tour" on the Travel Channel and the World Series of Poker on ESPN have been so strong that four poker-related shows are in development, although there is no guarantee that all will be aired.
The success of television and online poker has translated into a surge of entrants in tournaments, including the top tier events. First prize in this year's World Series of Poker, which took place in May and is now airing on television, doubled to $5 million from $2.5 million last year because of the increase in participants. The top tournament prize of "World Poker Tour" jumped to $2.7 million from $1 million.
When NBC broadcast a special "World Poker Tour" battle of champions opposite the pre-game show of this year's Super Bowl, an estimated 10 million people watched.
Poker had long been a late-night cable TV offering, but drew few viewers until three years ago when Lipscomb produced a documentary film on poker.
Lipscomb realized that watching on television was unsatisfying because viewers rarely saw the players' cards. In the most popular tournament game, Texas Hold 'em, every player has two cards that are dealt face down and are rarely revealed unless there is a showdown with another player at the end of the betting rounds.
Lipscomb, borrowing from a British TV program, developed the idea of putting cameras in the rim of the table to show the "hole cards" when each player looks at them. Viewers at home could then see what cards the players had and strategize along with them throughout the rounds of betting.
Lipscomb took the camera idea, and the notion of a more heavily edited, faster-paced and stylized program, to various cable TV outlets. The Travel Channel bit, and the "World Poker Tour" series was born.
"All of a sudden, poker became a cross between a game show and a reality show," said Dan Goldman, vice president of marketing for Pokerstars.com, an online poker site. "It revealed strategies. People started saying, 'I could do this, too.' " Although ESPN copied the camera idea and now televises the more well-known World Series of Poker, "World Poker Tour" Enterprises Inc. is growing rapidly, with tournaments in exotic locations and on cruise ships that have million-dollar prize pools. Last month, the company began selling shares of stock to the public, trading on the Nasdaq, and it has filed for a patent for its method of showing hole cards and odds for each hand.
