Scott Lacey has been hosting weekly Texas Hold 'Em games (with a paid dealer) at his apartment in South Boston for about two months. (Globe Staff Photo / Dina Rudick)
By Joe Yonan, Boston Globe Staff | April 22, 2004
There were no "lipstick cams" showing curled-up edges of cards to a TV audience, no breathless commentary. Granted, there were a few pairs of sunglasses, but no hooded sweatshirts used to hide poker faces from competitors looking for a "tell."
And, to be sure, the stakes were lower.
But when 22-year-old Vinny Liu, holding a pair of nines, went all-in on the flop, pushing his chips to the center of the table and intimidating his friends into folding, the spirit was the same. "Ah," sighed Dan Zand from across the table as Liu raked in the pot -- about $30.
"I actually had tens." He turned to a visitor, smiled, and shrugged: "I have a bad record against Vinny when he's all-in." Liu and his friends were playing no-limit Texas Hold'Em, the deceptively simple, high-drama game that has become the stuff of appointment TV thanks largely to the Travel Channel's "World Poker Tour."
Along with ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker (which begins today but starts airing in June), Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown," and an explosion of interest in online and casino games, the tour has given America poker fever, bringing what was once considered an older man's game to a younger, more diverse crowd. At the heart of the appeal is the fantasy that, with enough practice, any dark-horse amateur can become the next Moneymaker.
That's Chris Moneymaker, for those who didn't follow the prophetically named accountant's victory at last year's World Series. At age 27, Moneymaker became the first winner of the prestigious tournament who had qualified on the Internet, turning a $40 entry fee on Pokerstars.com into a seat alongside legendary players and, ultimately, the $2.5 million prize. "This is the sonic boom of poker," Nolan Dalla, the series' media director, told the Associated Press at the time.
Indeed. It would be akin to playing "Hot Shots Golf 3" so well on your Sony PlayStation 2 that you get to take on Tiger Woods in the PGA -- and you win.
Steven Lipscomb, creator of the groundbreaking World Poker Tour, estimates that as many as 80 million Americans are playing the game regularly, everywhere from online tournaments to home games to Web-driven meet-ups to packed casino tables. Feeding the fire has been Lipscomb's own Travel Channel show, which has drawn an average of 1 million viewers per episode to become the network's highest-rated series ever. World Poker Tour combines action-packed commentary, profiles, exotic locales, and that crucial "lipstick cam," which lets the audience in on the biggest secret of the game: the players' hands.
"Seeing top-flight players play in real money tournaments and getting to see their cards -- what could be better?" said Ashley Adams of Roslindale, who writes about poker for Card Player and other publications. "You get inside their brain, and they become larger than life. They become characters. It's just great theater."
Take the April 10 episode, in which Paul "Dot Com" Phillips bluffed Phil "The Unabomber" Laak out of a $200,000 pot at the Legends of Poker event at Los Angeles's Bicycle Casino. Viewers knew Phillips didn't have "the nuts," or an unbeatable hand, but Laak sure didn't. So when the betting rounds went all the way to the river -- or a fifth community card -- Phillips raised by $80,000.
"A bold bet on the last card with absolutely nothing," commentator Vince Van Patten said, then his voice softened to a whisper. "Tell you one thing: If Phil calls this, it would be a call of a lifetime."
He didn't. After an excruciating wait, Laak, wearing the sunglasses and hooded sweatshirt that earned him his nickname, threw down his pair of fives and folded.
Phillips, in his dark suit, calmly collected the chips, then couldn't resist breaking into a grin. "You know I hate showing hands, but there's so many people here, you've gotta see this," he said, holding his cards up to show the studio audience what the TV watchers had already seen: a jack-deuce, a nothing hand.
And the crowd went wild.
Of course, it's easier to stone-cold bluff your way into thousands when you're a dot-com millionaire and the money doesn't matter that much. For Phillips, maybe the stakes weren't so high after all.
Todd Boghosian of Peabody, on the other hand, was risking mere hundreds at Foxwoods Casino recently, and when he suffered, it was a "bad beat," not a bluff, that did him in. The 30-year-old, who works at a pharmaceutical company, was up by $1,000 on a recent Friday night, only 15 minutes before he was scheduled to leave his no-limit Hold'Em table to meet up with friends. "I look at my watch, and I'm thinking, what's the worst that can happen?" he recounts. "I'm not gonna play stupid, I'm not gonna play risky. I'm gonna play smart."
The next hand, his three kings got squashed in a showdown with triple aces, and within a few more hands he was down to $415, with only five minutes left to play.
Again, it came down to triple kings: two he was holding and one in the flop (alongside a 10 and a 2). He had been raising, and everybody had folded except a man Boghosian describes as a "really loose player," who then raised by $400. Boghosian went all-in, forcing his competitor to show his hand. As Boghosian had suspected, it was a pair of aces, but that wasn't enough to take it, not quite yet. After all, there were two more cards on the way.
"At this point, there's $1,100 in the pot, and I'm at least a 90 percent favorite to win," Boghosian says. "There's only two cards in the deck that can help him. The turn card comes, and it's the three of spades. No problem. The river comes down, and it's an ace. And it busted me. The whole table erupted. Nobody could believe it."
Boghosian drowned his sorrows in "several" Long Island iced teas, and ultimately took solace in the fact that at least his $300 investment bought him nine hours of play. "I had fun, and that was my primary goal," he says.
In the eyes of those worried about the potential for problem gambling, "fun" would be the operative word. "Most people are totally fine playing just about any game for relaxation and enjoyment," says Kathleen Scanlan, executive director of the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling. "But playing the very same game, some people are going to get into trouble."
The perils of poker addiction have been the stuff of subplots on "The Sopranos," where an ongoing, high-rollers' game last Sunday lured a rehab buddy of Christopher's into a $60,000 debt and off the wagon.
While Scanlan is not aware of an increase in calls to the group's hotline connected to the rise in poker passion, the group estimates that as many as 310,000 Massachusetts residents have experienced some kind of problem related to gambling, while it says 90,000 could be diagnosed as compulsive. But Scanlan notes that despite the increase in gambling opportunities in New England, no funded research on gaming addiction has been done in Massachusetts in more than a decade -- since before Mohegan Sun opened and before Foxwoods expanded.
Foxwoods, meanwhile, is seeing such an increase in interest in Texas Hold'Em poker that just last month it added 12 tables to its poker room and expanded the tournament area by another five. At Foxwoods, which offers the only casino poker in New England, last month's revenue from the game was 80 percent above the amount for March 2003, according to Kathy Raymond, director of poker operations. Coming soon: a computerized table sign-up system and perhaps even beepers, both aimed at reduced wait times.
"From the onset of the first broadcast of the World Poker Tour, back in March or April of last year, we have seen a constant and consistent increase in the number of players, the length of time of their play, the mix of players," Raymond said.
That means more women, and more young people. "I had a dealer who told me, `I know they were all under 30, and they all had their hat turned around backwards,' " she said. "The younger generation is a fun group. They bring a lot of action to the table. They're not afraid to take chances."
Even poker writer Adams, 46, who says only that his annual income from poker is "many thousands of dollars" and affords him trips all over the world, has found himself fooled by the wrongful assumption that these young people can't be any good. Don't get him wrong: There's lots of "loose money" in the game, and that's nothing but a good thing for a rounder like him. But plenty of these players, practicing online as Moneymaker did, have developed some serious chops.
"Online, you can play no-limit Texas Hold'Em tournaments every five seconds," he said, "and you can have the experience equivalent to somebody's lifetime within a month."
He remembers one game he was invited to at Harvard University that he thought would be easy pickings: a bunch of rich kids who don't know a thing about the game, falling prey to a professional. He took $1,000 with him.
"Well, two of them were really top-notch players," he said. "One was 19 years old, and he had been playing online for three years, a terrific player. The other was his protege. Thank God there was some dead money on the table from the other players, but I was the fish. And they lured me in."
Scott Lacey, 24, has been hosting weekly games of Texas Hold
'Em, sometimes with no limit, sometimes with a low limit, in his South Boston apartment for about two months now. He finds strangers through e-mail lists and websites such as recpoker.com, home
pokergames.com, and poker.meet
up.com. Technically, betting even in private homes is illegal in Massachusetts, with a potential punishment of up to three years in prison and a $3,000 fine, but Lacey's not worried. "I think the city of Boston has a lot better things to do than break up my little home poker game," he says. If it did, he would still have Foxwoods and the TV shows. The World Poker Tour's second season is well under way, and this year's World Series of Poker runs through May 28, with ESPN's 22 hours of coverage starting June 8. On Bravo, the second season of "Celebrity Poker Showdown" begins in May, and the network hopes to repeat its success; it averaged 1.3 million viewers per show, placing it behind "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Boy Meets Boy."
Lacey, a fan of the Travel Channel and ESPN shows, won't be tuning in to Bravo.
"I was on the couch and turned it on once for five minutes, and I was so embarrassed," he said. "The play is so bad, it makes you wish that you were at the table."
Even Ben Affleck, who is in Las Vegas for the World Poker Tour championship? Isn't he supposed to be a decent poker player?
"I'd sit down with him any day," Lacey says without hesitation. "Ben's invited to come to South Boston any week he wants."
