Why to keep betting on Poker’s continued success
When I played little league in middle school, the only thing my coach ever said to me was, “Way to go down swinging!” Sad as this was, I much preferred his half-hearted encouragement to my teammate’s remarks, which ranged from, “You suck!” to, “Why don’t you just quit?” I eventually heeded their advice and tried some other sports. But my lack of athletic ability was not restricted to baseball – after dabbling in tennis, golf, basketball, and even cricket, by 10th grade I sadly accepted the fact that I would not be the next Vijay Singh or Bernie Williams. Still, I needed an outlet for my competitive spirit and, more importantly, a way to procrastinate endlessly. At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I found the glorious activity that met these qualifications when I first saw the movie Rounders.
Rounders details the quick fall and gradual rise of a young poker player played by Matt Damon. In its original theater release in 1998, Rounders made a scant $22 million; compare this with the recently released romantic comedy Hitch, which made double that its first weekend alone. Since then, however, sales of Rounders have exploded, prompting Miramax in September 2004 to re-release the DVD in a new special edition. Times were changing: in the six years between 1998 and 2004, the game of poker exploded into mainstream America. No longer was poker reserved for seedy middle-aged cigar-smoking men playing in underground clubs. In fact, Alvin Alvarez, writer of the wildly popular series “The Biggest Game in Town,” estimates that some 60 million Americans now play poker regularly, fully 20% of the total population.
I joined this statistic four years ago, before the “fad” really hit. Poker was the first competitive game I was actually good at. After watching Rounders, I went and bought my first book on poker (I now own eight) and read and re-read it countless times over the following weeks. I convinced my friends to play with me for very low stakes, and would almost always end the night with an extra twenty in my pocket. As I played more and more, I became more and more hooked on the game – I bought more books, started playing with older kids, and eventually began playing online.
The beauty of poker is that it is not a game of luck – it is a game of knowing what to do with the luck you are dealt. Because at its core poker is a game of probability, some of the best poker players in the world are former accountants, bankers, and mathematicians – and a former Dartmouth Economics major, David “Chip” Reese ’73. No one can always win at poker, but you can make moves that have a positive expected value – meaning that over the long run, you can consistently make money. This completely rational way of looking at poker is diametrically opposed to the stereotypical view of poker as a game where rough men engage in a competition of pure bravado for the highest stakes possible – their manhood.
To be fair, poker did originate as a game played between rough men – rough men playing in sleazy New Orleans casinos at start of the 19th century. These men played a variant of poker with only 20 cards; it moved to its modern 52-card form in 1837. Poker was carried westward by frontiersmen and was soon the game of choice in saloons throughout the nation. Since then, poker’s popularity has been steadily on the rise, but the game did not really gain full respectability and true mainstream appeal until its explosion in the past few years.
One of the largest factors contributing to poker’s rise is the huge publicity generated by the World Series of Poker, broadcast on ESPN each summer. The annual World Series of Poker (WSOP) started in 1971 with only eight participants; last year, over 2,500 entered the $10,000 buy-in main event, a figure expected to cross 5,000 participants this year. The World Series pays out much more money than any professional sports tournament – last year’s winner Greg Raymer took home $5 million for four days work.
Although the two may seem unrelated, a boom in online poker playing has accompanied the increased popularity of the WSOP – in fact, the 2003 WSOP champion Chris “Moneymaker” won his entrance seat playing online. Online poker is now a $2 billion a year industry, a figure growing at 100% a year. At this very moment, there are 73,012 active players on partypoker.com, the world’s largest online poker site. Last year poker players wagered a total of $16 billion at online casinos. Questions of legality and regulation notwithstanding, online poker provides a way for new players to try the game without any of the pressures of an actual card room, and a place for experienced players to play without leaving home.
Instead of hurting casino poker business as might be expected, all trends point to online poker helping the land-based casino poker business. Most major casinos have upgraded their poker rooms in the past few years, and almost all those that did not have poker rooms have since built them. Casino revenue from poker rooms, although nowhere near the amount casinos make from slots, is on the rise. The hard fact is that many more people play poker than ever before, and this trend shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
The country’s obsession with poker has led to some problems, however – especially among younger demographics. Last year, after two Dartmouth students won $35,000 in an online tournament, the Hanover Police Department threatened to press online gambling charges. The University of Pennsylvania took matters into its own hands last November when it started canceling fraternity poker tournaments. And on a much smaller scale, a few students in my old Middle School were caught playing poker for money during lunch and severely reprimanded.
Regardless of these threats, nothing is likely to stop poker’s rise – like baseball or jazz, it is just too much a part of our nation’s identity. Mark Twain once said, “There are few things so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. It is enough to make one ashamed of the species.” I’m sure Mark would be much more satisfied today – after poker’s recent explosion, no one could accuse our nation of neglecting poker. For me at least, it is trying not to neglect everything but poker that is now the problem.
