The odds of hitting a royal flush in Texas Hold’em are roughly 650,000-to-1. The game of
poker itself drew a💷 hand perhaps even more unlikely 20 years ago when ESPN, burgeoning
online technology, the reality TV craze, and an overnight💷 sensation with an
all-too-perfect name all hit at the 2003 World Series of Poker.
On May 23, 2003, Chris
Moneymaker of💷 Spring Hill, Tennessee — population less than 8,000 per the 2000 U.S.
Census — lived up to his surname when💷 hisR$40 entry into the 34th World Series of Poker
via PokerStars becameR$2.5 million.
Moneymaker’s dramatic defeat of Sam Farha in the
💷 finale of the WSOP Main Event set off what the tournament’s media director in 2003,
Nolan Dalla, presciently described to💷 the Associated Press that night as “the sonic
boom of poker.”
But not everyone at Binion’s Gambling Hall in downtown Las💷 Vegas – at
the time, Binion’s Horseshoe – projected the game’s trajectory as a TV product over the
coming years.
“Without💷 much background besides seeing the numbers for how many players
were in the Main Event, I was incredibly stunned by💷 the meteoric growth that happened
over the next two, three, and four years,” said Norman Chad. “I never saw the💷 poker TV
boom coming. I just happened to be there.”
Chad became the voice of poker in the 2000s,
a color💷 commentator whose lighthearted candor made him to the game what Dick Vitale has
long been to college basketball or John💷 Madden was to pro football.
But while Vitale
and Madden came into sports that were already well-established TV products, Chad was💷 on
the ground floor of a new cornerstone for televised sports broadcasting. The 2003 WSOP
was his first time calling💷 the event – and it was also one of the last in downtown
Vegas.
“It was a new landscape for me,”💷 said Chad. “And it just felt like old-school
gambling… [Binion’s] was a grittier property than [a resort on] the Strip,💷 so
everything was just smaller and everyone seemed to know each other.”
The close-knit
atmosphere and less glitzy style Chad describes💷 brings to mind nostalgia for a Las
Vegas of yesteryear; like Robert DeNiro’s Ace Rothstein in Casino lamenting a time💷 when
“dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played.”
Martin Scorcese’s gangland
film, made in 1995, refers to an💷 era when Las Vegas transitioned from smoke-filled and
whiskey-soaked gambling halls to mega-resorts that often targeted families. The Vegas
of💷 the ‘90s relied on amusement parks and themed hotels with imagery of ancient Egypt,
Camelot, and so on.
By the turn💷 of the 21st Century, the city underwent another
transition away from family-oriented vacationing to attracting adults in pursuit of
debauchery.💷 Moneymaker’s game-changing WSOP win predated by just a few months the Las
Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority introducing a new💷 slogan: What Happens in
Vegas, Stays in Vegas.
The WSOP was an event undergoing transformation, emanating from
a city undergoing transformation.💷 And the vehicle through which this evolution emanated
happened to be the most prominent platform for sports.
The WSOP remains a💷 summertime
staple of television. But in the 2000s, it was the hottest summertime programming the
network had to offer. In💷 the early days of broadcasting the event, however, it wasn’t
so much a product of the Disney-owned machine.
Instead, ESPN contracted💷 out to 441
Productions.
“The way they set it up, they created the modern World Series Main Event,”
Chad said. “They💷 created the feel, the look, everything that is still… emulated
today.”
441 Productions produced the WSOP with an aesthetic that made💷 a game slow by
nature into exciting television. Vital to the presentation was the hole card camera,
which the late💷 Poker Hall of Fame inductee, Henry Orenstein, is credited for
innovating.
Orenstein’s idea of a small hole at the bottom of💷 the table, through which
players’ hands could be broadcast to the audience without spoiling the game, kept the
presentation from💷 becoming “the proverbial watching-paint-dry” as Chad described
it.
The hole card camera allowed the ESPN audience to follow Moneymaker’s daring
strategy💷 to the top of the tournament.
Moneymaker revealed to the AP upon his win that
he “bluffed a lot… but somehow💷 I got away with it.”
441 Productions’ use of the hole
card camera showed the TV audience bluffs in real-time, adding💷 to the excitement of
knowing the hand while competitors were left guessing.
Viewers were indeed excited –
and online poker platforms💷 like PokerStars were there to indulge this new audience’s
curiosity.
As the online venue through which Moneymaker qualified, PokerStars reaped
plenty💷 of benefits from his success. The fledgling service – it hosted its first paid
tournament in September 2001 – reported💷 growth from 50,000 to 100,000 users immediately
following the 2003 WSOP.
Online poker became ubiquitous enough at the time that a
💷 memorable Chappelle’s Show skit features Dave Chappelle browsing the internet – if the
internet were a physical location. He is💷 inundated with solicitations for online
gambling from a dealer at a poker table at every turn.
Prospective players indeed had
no💷 shortage of options to play, but the industry had outlets that were clearly more
professional than others. Full Tilt and💷 PartyPoker, two of the more prominent
platforms, had their satellite entries into the WSOP akin to the PokerStars avenue that
💷 launched Moneymaker.
All of it came together to help fuel an explosion in
participation.
“It was incredible because it was 600-plus the💷 year before,” Chad said,
referencing the participation in 2002. “It was 800-plus [participants] in ‘03. It went
from 800 to💷 2,500 to 5,600 in back-to-back years.”
Exponential growth necessitated a
move to a bigger space, and in 2005, the WSOP left💷 downtown’s Binion’s Horseshoe for
Rio to accommodate more players.
And even with more space, the WSOP had still become
almost too💷 big to contain.
“My first trip to the WSOP was in 2006, when I played in
aR$1,500 no-limit hold ’em event,”💷 said Brian Pedersen, a sportswriter and regular WSOP
player. “That was the second year it had been at the Rio,💷 and they definitely weren’t
prepared for how big it had gotten. Tables are usually 9- or 10-handed in events like
💷 that but we had to play almost 2 hours with 11 players because of how big the field
was. And💷 I certainly wasn’t the only first-timer there.”
The influx of newcomers to the
poker world as a direct result of the💷 WSOP’s ESPN presence paralleled another trend of
the decade: sudden stardom found on reality television.
—
Although not on the heart of
💷 the Strip, located slightly to the west, Rio occupies a stretch of Flamingo Road that
reflected the 21st Century vision💷 for Vegas in the 2000s.
A modern (built in 1990)
tower of shimmering blue-and-pink glass, Rio symbolized glitz and glamor. And,💷 in a
fitting coincidence, it occupies an area of the city near The Palms, a casino that
helped usher in💷 the What happens in Vegas ethos a few months prior to the 2003 WSOP
when it hosted MTV’s Real World.
Real💷 World, for the uninitiated, is the granddaddy of
reality television. The show’s popularity in the 1990s provided a template for💷 the boom
of the genre at the turn of the millennium, with CBS hitting paydirt through Big
Brother and Survivor.
Reality💷 TV – or, more accurately, its more reputable cousin,
documentary television – played a role in poker’s boom. 441 Productions💷 executive
producer Matt Maranz told former ESPN outlet Grantland in a 2013 oral history he
initially approached the network with💷 plans for a poker documentary – the pitch instead
became broadcasting the WSOP.
“I’m not a reality show fan, but I💷 consider [WSOP] to be
the purest reality show,” Chad said. “The other reality shows are gimmicked up, setting
people up💷 in a house to be thrown out or going to a desert island to eat bugs. This was
their lives.💷 This was how they lived, this is how they played.”
In this sense, WSOP was
less comparable to the reality TV💷 of questionable truthfulness and perhaps more akin to
another hit of the same time frame.
FOX successfully adapted a British sensation💷 that
fused reality with competition in American Idol. Idol’s first season, which concluded
one year before Moneymaker’s defeat of Farha,💷 elevated an unknown singer named Kelly
Clarkson into the national consciousness.
Like Idol, the WSOP chronicled the rise of an
unknown💷 with a skill that might not have otherwise had the stage to shine. Like Idol,
the concept attracted myriad pretenders💷 without said skill.
But unlike Idol, which made
hay from scores of talentless wannabes who fancied themselves singers – with FOX
💷 heavily marketing cringy early-round tryouts from hopefuls who couldn’t carry a tune –
the WSOP Main Event wasn’t a platform💷 for those out of their depth.
That doesn’t mean
they didn’t exist in the poker world, however.
“All the time it would💷 happen,” poker
player Scott Hirsch says of games with competitors who didn’t know even the most basic
rules of the💷 game. “I was playing a limit game once… and I was on the river with the
best hand possible and💷 this lady kept raising me, would not stop. I kept looking at my
hand and the board making sure I💷 wasn’t misreading. She raised until she was out of
money and turned over a hand that was the fifth possible💷 best hand. When she turned it
over she said, ‘Nuts.’”
Perhaps the closest ESPN had to the failed Idol contestants
came💷 not on the WSOP telecast, but the defunct Page 2.
Bill Simmons became ESPN’s most
prominent and influential writer thanks in💷 part to his embrace of the early 2000s What
happens in Vegas attitude and frequent pop-culture references – among the💷 most common,
the Matt Damon poker-themed film, Rounders.
Simmons’ flirtation with the poker boom led
to a 2006 column in ESPN:💷 The Magazine in which the writer, harkening to Rounders,
dismissed his unsuccessful performance at the WSOP as indicative of poker💷 being nothing
more than a game of luck.
How much influence on the everyman’s interest in pursuing
poker more seriously was💷 had from Simmons – a columnist whose popularity was built on
being presented as The Everyman – is impossible to💷 gauge.
But a much more serious blow
to the general public’s fascination with poker came just a few months after the
💷 dismissive ESPN column in the form of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of
2006.
Passed by the House in July💷 and the Senate in September 2006 – with at least one
senator saying neither did their due diligence before it💷 went into effect in October –
UIGEA led to the poker boom going bust.
“I didn’t understand the online effect in💷 ‘03
and ‘04 until I looked at the numbers [online platforms] were sending to the World
Series Main Event,” said💷 Chad. “It was 30-to-40 percent of the total.”
Chad estimates
that the WSOP “would have passed 10,000 [participants] in the Main💷 Event years ago”
without the implementation of UIGEA.
Free-to-play games remained in the law’s wake, but
with no stakes that were💷 not in any way indicative of how true poker is played. That in
turn denied players a space to hone💷 their craft.
“When they shut online in America down
everything changed,” said Hirsch. “Americans used to dominate the game; now they💷 are
the worst. Online offers you the opportunity to play so many more hands than live, and
it can all💷 be put in a database and analyzed so you get better so much more quickly
playing online.”
Without the internet presence,💷 prospects of ESPN broadcasting the rise
of another Chris Moneymaker went from astronomical to entirely nonexistent. Had the
government’s intervention💷 happened just a few years earlier, the 2000s poker boom may
never happen – or at least, not to the💷 magnitude it happened.
“I wish we could go back
and put a parallel scenario where the guy [Moneymaker] beat wins [in💷 2003], Sammy
Farha, and then take a look at the boom we would have had,” Chad said. “We would have
💷 had a boom either way. Chris Moneymaker made it a bigger boom [but] I think we would
have had it💷 without Chris.”
