After a Golden Era, Poker’s Stack Is Down, By Steve Friess - The New York Times - 7th November 2008

In a few days, the multimillion-dollar set would begin to take form, the players and their posses would arrive in town, and the hype machine surrounding one of the biggest gambles in the history of card games would kick into high gear.

But before then, a small thin man who wears pinstripe suits and paisley ties and doesn’t look anything like a gambler peered out from a barren stage at the empty 1,000-seat theater in early November and nodded his approval.

“We’re a long way from Benny’s Bullpen, huh?” said Jeffrey Pollack, 44, the commissioner of the World Series of Poker, referring to the squalid smoky room at a dump of a Las Vegas casino where, in 1970, seven grizzled card players held a little tournament to crown one of them a world poker champ.

“This is a lot different.”

But as calm and collected as Mr. Pollack and his team appear — these are poker people, after all — they have a problem. Poker’s status as pop phenomenon, a game that burst from insular casinos to become a fixture of cable television and attracted Hollywood card sharks like Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire, is in trouble.

Poker is drawing fewer television viewers, and it is drawing fewer low-stakes players inspired by the big names to visit Las Vegas. Television ratings for the poker world series on ESPN peaked in 2005, with last year’s event drawing 32 percent fewer viewers than the previous year. The number of players entering the world series, the game’s most prestigious tournament, hit a high of 8,773 in 2006. Only 6,844 entered this year, a 22 percent decline. (The championship is to be played on Monday.)

Poker’s golden era of growth was highlighted here by the $7-million refurbishment of the poker area at the Bellagio hotel and casino in 2005. But now poker rooms around Las Vegas are contracting; the one at the Las Vegas Hilton was replaced last year by 36 Wheel of Fortune slot machines, and the one at the Excalibur was replaced with dealerless electronic poker tables.

“Poker became this cultural phenomenon, and since then it’s certainly leveled off,” said Jeff Haney, a gaming columnist for The Las Vegas Sun. “I don’t think I’d call it a crash, but there were clear signs the market was oversaturated with goofy poker shows on TV.”

Enter Mr. Pollack, an executive with experience promoting Nascar and the National Basketball Association, who decided that this year the World Series of Poker would halt midway through the tournament to allow for four months of building suspense before the finals. So in July, once the thousands of entrants were whittled down to nine players, those finalists left to promote themselves as poker ambassadors. They have now returned here for a two-day finale to compete for a $9.1-million top prize.

In years past, the tournament was completed all at once and broadcast on ESPN in the fall, by which time most enthusiasts already knew who had won. This time, the so-called November Nine are to play down on Sunday to two competitors, who face off Monday.

ESPN plans to edit a two-hour show about the final two days of play, which will be broadcast on Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern time. (Nevada law prohibits broadcasting live gambling events in progress.)

“I don’t know how it winds up being received, but I think they’re really smart,” said Steve Lipscomb, chief executive and founder of a competing poker series, the World Poker Tour, which puts on high-stakes tournaments around the world. “I don’t think it’s a market changer — that all of a sudden everyone does it,” he said, referring to the four-month timeout in the world series. “Then it gets silly. But any innovator has to cringe and do something different.”

Mr. Pollack learned much of what he knows about developing sporting franchises at the knee of the N.B.A.’s legendary commissioner, David Stern, for whom he worked in marketing. He later spent five years as chief of broadcast and new media for Nascar.

“The goal is to make the World Series of Poker more popular than ever and more relevant,” said Mr. Pollack as he gave a tour of the trailers backstage, where, he said, 90 ESPN technicians will handle the final feeds.

This year’s schedule has been controversial. Explaining the logic behind it, Mr. Pollack said of the event: “It was developing a level of awareness in the pop culture that was very significant. But we stopped to ask, ‘If this were taking place on a basketball court or football field, how would we grow it?’ ”

The pause is aimed in part at turning the final nine players into poker-world celebrities, which has not been the case in recent years. The starting field of players is now large, and it has been seven years since a well-known poker star has made it to the Final Table, leaving poker fans without a Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan to root for.

“You’ll never see a real pro win the tournament again — a recognized pro, let’s put it that way,” said poker’s elder statesman, Doyle Brunson, 74, who has won more than $5.3 million in tournaments, including 10 different world series events. “I just go in and try to play well. But the magnitude of the numbers makes it impossible. It’s like I got a bull’s-eye on me. Every one of those players wants to break me. I have to overcome so many obstacles that it’s not realistic to think I can win.”

The nine finalists this year have each approached their break differently. All have landed sponsorships from Internet poker sites and the like, with the chip leader, a 53-year-old truck salesman named Dennis Phillips, of St. Louis, also landing a deal with Ford. The company is believed to be the first automotive sponsor of poker. Mr. Phillips and his opponents, four of whom are from foreign countries, have all been profiled by their local newspapers and TV stations and have been invited — expenses paid — to play in tournaments around the world.

For making it this far, they have each won at least $900,670, which they have already received. One of the final group is Kelly Kim, currently in ninth place with such a low number of chips that he acknowledged he is likely to be knocked out early when play resumes. He said the four months in limbo have been nerve-wracking but also financially rewarding because he is enjoying attention that usually comes only to the champion.

“I understand why they’re doing this, and I’ve probably benefited more than anyone considering where I am, but I’m really sick of my situation,” said Mr. Kim, 31, a poker pro from Whittier, Calif.

Mr. Pollack views the lack of transcendent poker stars at the Final Table as the charm of the tournament, not a problem. “You can’t buy your way onto an N.B.A. court,” he said. “You can’t buy your way onto an N.F.L. field. You can, however, enter the World Series of Poker and potentially walk away as a world champion.”

His organization recently wrapped up its second year of a European edition, with offshoots planned for Latin America and Asia. The World Poker Tour, too, is expanding overseas, having recently struck a deal with the Chinese government to produce a televised nongambling version of tractor poker, a popular Asian card game, as “a means of getting people comfortable to do card games on TV,” Mr. Lipscomb said.

“It’s a big world,” he said. “An awful lot of places are exploding right now. Just not as much in the U.S.”

(Credit: The New York Times)

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