Everyone’s a Player in Poker’s New Deal

After a marathon 14-hour final round, an Australian chiropractor turned professional cardplayer emerged Saturday morning as the new champion of the World Series of Poker -- a victory that earned him $7.5 million and placed him, for the moment anyway, atop a wave of poker mania that in the past few years has swept across the country.

“How could it not change my life?” 39-year-old Joseph Hachem, his face pasty after a long night and morning in a darkened upstairs card room of Binion’s Gambling Hall & Hotel, a somewhat tired but historic casino in downtown Las Vegas. “It changes everything.”

As Hachem reveled in his victory over a Maryland mortgage banker who seemed astonished to even be in the big game, two guards in suits and ties, brandishing shotguns, watched over a table covered with stacks of cash that represented his winnings -- a pile that a few hours before had been paraded into the card room with theatrical overkill befitting the reality television series that this once-obscure event has become.

More than 5,600 players ponied up the $10,000 entry fee and converged on Las Vegas for the weeklong tournament. It was a record turnout -- more than double that of last year, the previous record.

The numbers reflect an explosion of popularity that has rocketed the game of cowpokes and riverboat cardsharps into a modern cultural phenomenon, occasionally making familiar television faces out of otherwise anonymous cardplayers.

“I plan on being on TV some day,” said Mike Fetter, a 42-year-old construction worker from Long Beach. “I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t want to be famous. I just want the money. Praise the Lord and take the money. That’s me.”

That was on Wednesday, midway through the tournament’s whittling-down of the initial field, a process that more than anything was reminiscent of a wholesale poultry slaughterhouse.

The cutting was being done on tables spread across the Rio hotel’s vast Amazon room. The incessant clicking of cardplayers fingering their stacks of chips reverberated. It sounded like charging locusts eating their way over the next hill.

Fetter -- a muscular man with a crew cut and steely blue eyes, dressed in sandals, shorts and a T-shirt adorned with a cross -- was out of the running, having finished somewhere around 900th. That wasn’t a bad showing.

The top 560 players finished in the money on a scale that slid from $1,000 or so to a guaranteed $1 million or more for the nine finalists, with the winner taking $7.5 million. The 5,000 losers went home empty-handed, their $10,000 entry fees underwriting the winnings and administrative costs.

None of them seemed to complain about the system, apparently because they all tended to regard themselves as the next winner. Economic master’s theses could be devoted to this self-generating arrangement.

Besides the exploding tournament play, the poker boom has generated a host of poker-related websites and magazines. Two poker circuits have become fodder for dueling television series on the Discovery Channel and ESPN. (The latter channel will convert raw footage of this tournament into a weekly program to air in the late summer and fall.)

Along the way, poker has become almost ubiquitous, with suburban 14-year-olds now conversant in strategies and lingo once known only to crusty characters with names like Doc and Pops. Some market tipsheets tout poker and other gambling-related stocks as “hot buys.”

Flamboyant players with such monikers as The Mouth and Jesus have emerged as minor television personas. Nobodies have risen up unexpectedly to win big tournaments -- as the aptly named Chris Moneymaker did here in 2003, in what many see as the boom’s ground-zero moment.

“One of the reasons why poker has become so popular is that anyone can be a poker player, anyone might be the next millionaire,” said Eric Morris, publisher of Bluff, a glossy magazine he co-founded last year. “I mean, I’m never going to play right field for the San Francisco Giants, but I might be one tournament away.”

With the enthusiasm of a man with a new magazine devoted to the topic, Morris described the current poker-playing demographic: “It’s everybody. Grandmas who were playing bridge are now playing poker. Bingo players are playing poker. The Dungeons & Dragons players are playing poker. The video players are playing poker.”

The veteran players riding the wave -- and reveling in its endorsement deals and fatter tournament pots -- credit the television poker shows and related websites.

They cite one television innovation in particular as crucial: ESPN’s placement of tiny in-table cameras that show viewers each player’s facedown cards. This arms the viewers with more information than the players, allowing them to see who’s bluffing and who might be blundering into colossal defeat.

Online tournaments and training feed thousands more players into the casino tournaments. Many of those players have honed their skills much more quickly than could previous generations, which trained in barroom and pool-hall academies.

Some poker professionals who once had the tournament scene pretty much to themselves resent the computer-schooled novices, and the way that television producers have turned their major events into soundstages.

The new players, they complain, are often boneheaded and erratic in their strategies, which, as it turns out, can make them highly effective when luck brings them good cards. Indeed, throughout this tournament, one uncanny pattern seemed to hold: Pro players who prevailed in a round were congratulated for skillful play; triumphs by novices were dismissed as dumb luck.

Another downside of the changed atmosphere, many here suggested, was that the television cameras encouraged in some celebrity-hungry players outbursts of preening and trash-talking that in the dustier days of yore, at least according to Western legend, would have been met with a well-placed bullet from across the table: But sheriff, he was beggin’ for it.

As the numbers suggest, there is no typical new player. They seem to come from everywhere. Fetter, who works underground boring major tunnels, said he picked up the game relatively late in his life, participating in low-stakes games called nooners in card rooms across the Southland.

A Christian, he cited a guiding Scripture and swore he never petitioned the Lord to fill an inside straight or drop him a needed ace.

“I don’t pray for that. I pray for souls. I want to save souls, spread the Word. But yes, I want to win.”

Fetter said he had no intention of quitting his construction work. Those players who pursued the dream of millions and a full-time life of high-stakes poker often run headlong into a harder reality: “That life is too up and down. I know a lot of guys who are busted all the time. You have got to have a job, I think.”

He told of one poker-playing roommate who had raked in half a million dollars at a tournament not long ago: “Now the money’s all gone. He owes me about $20,000.”

Such cautionary tales are heard often around tournaments, stories of winners brought down by lavish habits of the usual sorts. One top player’s recent drug arrest was whispered about all week.

As the tournament progressed and the stakes rose, the play seemed to slow to a cautious crawl. The last big-name player -- Mike “The Mouth” Matusow -- was the first of the nine finalists to be eliminated, and rather abruptly. His fellow celebrity professionals, present to provide expert commentary for ESPN, consoled him, describing his play as perfect and the opponent who ousted him as a lucky dimwit.

His departure seemed to suck energy from the room, and a night of tedium, broken by brief moments of drama, ensued. Make no mistake, whatever virtues it might have as a canned television show, tournament poker is hardly a spectator sport. Not for nothing does ESPN reduce 2,300 hours of taped play to 23 hours of programming.

During this long march of passes, folds and hoarded chips, 78-year-old Walter Clyde “Puggy” Pearson, a tournament original and the 1973 champion, a spry little man with a straw hat and a cigar in his pocket, could be found on a camera rise near the main stage, taking stock of the scene.

Here were a handful of players -- many of them college graduates who learned the game of Texas Hold ‘Em on the Internet, some attired in shorts and sandals -- positioned around a green felt table that bore the logo of a sponsor: a male potency enhancer. Cameras tracked their every move, and the crowd had the feel of what it was: a TV game show audience.

This, Pearson said, was not the poker he had learned as a “broke hillbilly” boy, playing in whatever back-room, crooked game he could find in little towns from Tennessee to Texas, “hustling, scuffling, roundin’ and gamblin’ ” his way to Las Vegas, which he reached in the mid-1950s.

This, he said, was “an entirely different game. It’s so big now. And it’s going to get bigger.” Pearson recalled that when he won the tournament in 1973, there were 13 players and the grand prize was $130,000.

There was no television coverage back then. There was no Cardplayer.com or any other website, no Bluff magazine. There were no libido drugs. The world changes, and Pearson is one of those optimistic sorts who will tell you that not all change is bad.

And yet, with all respect to the wisdom of the current professionals, there remains one fundamental of poker, he said, that has not changed.

“Let me tell you fellas something. Poker is a lot like life itself: It’s 98.5% luck, 1.5% skill. It’s always been that way. Always will be.”