The Game Today
Of course poker has many variations in 7-card Stud, Omaha, 5 Card Draw and of course the game we tend to play today in ‘Texas Hold’Em’ but let’s face it poker (Texas Hold’Em) has never been so popular. From its humble TV beginnings on Channel 4, in the UK, back in 1999 to the development of the TV extravaganza that currently is the World Poker Tour in the USA, poker has reached the masses.
Not that it wasn’t played by the masses before you understand! It’s just that the masses never knew that the game they’d played on their kitchen tables worldwide for years before all the razzmatazz started could actually be a spectator sport.
With poker on TV, Internet Poker and card rooms up and down the land enjoying record attendances we’re now at a stage where we can truly say that poker has arrived.
As with any ‘new’ fad though we have to put up with the drudge. In ‘Celebrity Poker’ we have the usual Z-list bodies pretending they know how to play the game and generally making a mockery of the game we love so much. Mind you I suppose it shows that just about anyone can play and even win a substantial amount of money, as with the case of snooker player Jimmy ‘The Whirlwind’ White who shocked everyone, in the poker world, by winning the 2003 Poker Million.
Order was restored in the 2004 event when Donnecha‘O’Dea, from Ireland, and a professional poker player to boot, beat Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott in a classic AA v QQ final hand match up where all the money went into the middle before the flop and when no Queen appeared to save Dave it was all over in an instant.
Throughout the land thousands of new poker players, mostly students, are filling the card rooms like never before. Back in 1999 when I started to play the game in Ireland there was only one place you could play. That was at the Jackpot Club where 30+ like minded souls would get together of a Friday night and play in the IR£25 rebuy tournaments. Today there are two distinct clubs (Jackpot & Fitzwilliam) where, on a similar Friday night, you’ll now find in excess of 100 players spread between the two venues playing No Limit Texas Hold’Em like there was no tomorrow and loving every minute of it.
TV has caught on in a big way. Where Late Night Poker used to be the only show in town its now wall to wall TV poker. Sky TV, Challenge TV, Living TV, Discovery Channel, Channel 5. The list goes on.
Of course a dedicated poker channel wasn’t too far down the road but these seem to have been a bridge too far for the masses and after an initial ‘explosion’ of TV poker things seemed to have settled back down a little.
Now the accent is on ‘organised poker tours’. The EPT was born out recognition that the US model TV show, the WPT, had made stars out of its players and was regularly the number 1 show on the US TV Travel channel. Calling it the ‘World Poker Tour’ was somewhat of a misnomer as out of the 13-16 shows televised each year you were lucky to find two that left the shores of the USA.
The ‘European Poker Tour’ – EPT – is pretty much a WPT look-alike except that its tour comprises of events held exclusively throughout Europe. A raging success where the first million euro 1st prize cannot be far away.
William Hill, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, Blue Square etc all have their own ‘televised’ events and with the deregulation of the gambling industry about to become reality in Sept 2007 there can only be further growth in the way bookmakers and casino owners alike use poker as a tool to market their product range!
Where poker is heading is anyone’s guess but for us here right now let’s start at the beginning and learn to play first. After that the world is your oyster.
Next week’s article is on Internet Poker
