At this World Series a full house is expected

Mention of the World Series once exclusively evoked runs, hits and errors. But that's the old World Series. The new World Series, at least new in the consciousness of millions of Americans, has a far different lexicon: flop, turn and river. Also, all-in, on tilt and bad beat.

The 36th World Series of Poker, the marquee event of the card craze that has saturated TV and even elbowed its way onto sports pages, begins its championship finale Thursday at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas with an expected record-shattering field of 6,600 competitors. With each occupied seat representing a $10,000 buy-in, the total prize pool will be more than $62 million. The winner will earn $7.4 million, and every player who survives to the final table of nine will walk away a millionaire.

The main event, the $10,000 No-limit Texas Hold 'em World Championship, is actually the denouement of a series of 45 individual poker tournaments of varying styles and buy-ins, which will have a total prize pool exceeding $100 million. That makes the six-week WSOP probably the richest competition in the country, outstripping most major golf tournaments, horse races and prize fights - and certainly the players' share of that other World Series.

"Nobody knows what the future of poker will be," said Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, whose black cowboy hat and beard help make him one of the more recognizable stars on the card-playing scene. "But no one - not the game's biggest promoters - could have predicted this."

Entries for this year's final event, which will run for about 10 days, are more than double last year's field of more than 2,500, and that group tripled the previous year of 839.

The 2003 championship was the seminal occasion for poker's run to pop culture obsession when a then-unknown, 27-year-old accountant from Tennessee with the Dickensian name of Chris Moneymaker won $2.5 million and the coveted gold bracelet that goes with any WSOP victory after he had qualified for the tournament with a $39 investment in an Internet satellite game.

That a player with virtually no big-time experience and a meager starting stake could catapult to rock star status helped touch off a poker-playing frenzy that reaches from the world's ritziest casinos to high school lunchrooms and college dorms.

Orin Starn, a Duke University professor who teaches a course in sports anthropology, said the rise of poker speaks to broader societal mores and values.

"Sports don't gain or lose popularity in a vacuum," Starn said. "They respond to some development in American culture."

Starn pointed to basketball as a game that enjoyed an unexpected surge. "It was invented in 1891 and by the early 20th century, it was broadly accepted and it stuck," the professor said.

That game's introduction coincided with an increasingly sedentary society's recognition of fitness and exercise, and it could be played indoors.

"So why poker now?" Starn said. "For one [thing], it fits with an American fascination with winner-take-all. Poker is a place where people are dealing with huge sums of money, jackpots. You can get rich overnight."

Plus, Starn said, the game's TV success is consistent with the current appeal of all types of reality TV.

Here for a while?

The question is whether, like basketball, poker is here for the long haul or simply a fad.

"Unlike the hula-hoop, poker is something that has been with us a long time," said Steve Moore, a senior vice president with IMG, an international sports representation and marketing firm whose clients include Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning and Maria Sharapova.

"Poker has just been latent and behind closed doors. If you played, maybe you didn't talk about it. But here we have something that really has been popular all along and now it has a Good Housekeeping Seal. It's all right to play and talk about it, and it's even being considered a quasi-sport."

But like all sudden successes, such as hot real estate markets or dot-com stocks, the game's popularity bubble raises concerns.

"Will it hit a zenith in terms of TV viewership? I think it will," Moore said. "I'm not sure it will become mainstream."

For now, though, poker's surging popularity has reached huge proportions, especially among young people - a grave concern to those who work in gambling addiction.

"The primary reason it appeals to young people is the way it has been glamorized and promoted," said Keith Whyte, executive director for the National Council on Problem Gambling.

"We never had TV celebrating these [poker] celebrities and bringing the excitement and perceived skill. The glamour has not been accompanied by responsible messages."

Plus, the Internet - a landscape with which young people are comfortable - has been the entry point for many new poker players. "They start by playing for play money and when they think they're good enough, they move to real money," Whyte said.

"Even a decade ago, you wouldn't see advertising for gambling, let alone a whole show," Whyte added. "It's part of the shift that gambling is ubiquitous and the public acceptance of gambling in general.

Poker, in particular, recently took a step toward greater legitimacy within the media when The New York Times began running a weekly column on the game's strategy, players and lore in its sports pages. That follows a column already appearing in the Chicago Tribune.

Last year, when another little-known player, Connecticut patent attorney Greg Raymer, won $5 million in the World Series of Poker championship, only a handful of mainstream media reporters were there.

This year, more than 500 media credentials have been issued.

TV ratings for World Series of Poker games televised on ESPN - which are taped - rival viewership for some top live NBA matchups, although still far behind the NFL. And other networks that have TV poker, such as the Travel Channel with the World Poker Tour and Bravo, which airs Celebrity Poker Showdown, also enjoy solid ratings.

Television isn't the only thing new about the card game that was integral to frontier lore and a favorite pastime of Harry Truman. The WSOP, like much of the poker world, is going through a transition.

The tournament was born in old-time casino owner Benny Binion's gritty Horseshoe gambling hall in downtown Las Vegas, where the first winner in 1970, Johnny Moss, was voted the top player by his fellow pros.

The former Horseshoe, now simply called Binion's, doesn't even belong to Benny's family these days, and the tournament has been bought by gaming industry behemoth Harrah's Entertainment. Harrah's has moved the World Series from its venerable cradle to the swanky Rio, just off the Las Vegas Strip. This year, for the last time, just the final two days of the tournament will be played at Binion's, a nostalgic nod to the city's centennial observance.

Moving, moving ...

Most of the World Series action is being played in a newly built conference center called the Pavilion, which a tournament publicist referred to as a "poker arena." And there's a nearby virtual mall of vendors selling poker-related apparel, equipment and instructional materials, mirroring a poker retail blitz that began last December when retailers from Wal-Mart to Neiman Marcus began offering poker-playing sets and accessories.

The most substantial difference in New Age poker, though, is its players. Internet play in virtual poker rooms has introduced millions to the game worldwide and offered an opportunity to learn in a matter of months what it used to take pros years to master. The last two champions, Moneymaker and Raymer, won their seats in the main event in online qualifiers, and four players at last year's final table were from one Web site, PokerStars.com.

This year, PokerStars is expected to have close to 1,000 players in the championship; that's more competitors than in the entire field of the 2003 title tournament.

The advent of so many new faces has created a problem for poker's loosely knit establishment. While the likelihood of an unknown winning poker's richest prize reinforces the reverie of TV viewers that they can replicate the accomplishment, it works against building a cast of identifiable characters with whom fans can forge loyalties, such as familiar pros Ferguson, Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson, Phil "Poker Brat" Hellmuth, Howard "The Professor" Lederer, Phil Ivey and Annie Duke.

Still familiar

Interestingly, even though many of this year's preliminary games - which started June 2 - have had fields that sometimes exceeded 2,000, the names and faces that fans have grown to know have frequently prevailed.

Brunson, at the age of 72, won a 10th gold bracelet and $367,000 in a Hold 'em tournament Friday. A few days earlier, Johnny Chan, the last person to win back-to-back world championships, also picked up a 10th bracelet and $303,000. Ivey won his fifth gold bracelet and $630,000 at a final table that included Hellmuth in a game called Omaha. And 65-year-old T.J. Cloutier got his sixth bracelet and pocketed $657,000 after a No-limit Hold 'em victory.

In Texas Hold 'em, each player is dealt two cards, and five more are community cards that can be used by all players to make the best possible five-card poker hand. The rules give rise to an expression - any two cards can win.

And while that notion has helped drive the game's swell in popularity reflected in this year's enormous World Series of Poker turnout, the triumphs of Brunson and his fellow pros are a sobering reminder to the wide-eyed "wannabe" card sharks that it still matters a great deal who holds those two cards.

News Added: 03 July, 2005

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