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Everything You Need for a Poker Party, Save a Winning Hand
Published: 2005-05-01
 Everything You Need for a Poker Party, Save a Winning Hand
By COELI CARR
Published: May 1, 2005
BOUT a year and a half ago, Jeff Cook, a Houston firefighter, poured a slab for a 12-by-16 structure in his backyard in Spring, Tex., a Houston suburb. The stand-alone room he built atop it has a phone line, air-conditioning, a cable television connection and a stereo system. Its outside light, when on, is an invitation to stop by.
"If we do a big tournament, everybody brings chips," said Mr. Cook, who is married and has infant twin daughters. He was not referring to the potato, corn or nacho varieties, but to the plastic or clay-composite kind used for playing poker. Mr. Cook has built what he and neighbors affectionately call "the card shed," and although the table seats only seven, the room allows him impromptu "casino nights." "It's all here, basically," he said.
Mr. Cook built his house of cards to last, and most specialists expect similar longevity for today's poker craze. Having already spawned many poker-related enterprises, the phenomenon shows no sign of abating - certainly not if Steven Lipscomb, founder and chief executive of WPT Enterprises, has anything to say about it.
"Poker had been on television for years, but nobody watched it and nobody cared," said Mr. Lipscomb, who came up with the idea of letting viewers see what the face-down, or "hole," cards were, betting that this would provide a lot more small-screen poker drama. Convinced that he had a winning concept, he raised the requisite millions of dollars himself, and in 2003 the Travel Channel introduced the show, called "World Poker Tour," featuring the popular game called Texas Hold 'Em. The program's debut, with hole cards visible to viewers, coincided with the growing popularity of online poker. The show now draws two million to five million viewers a week, both experienced players and neophytes.
And Mr. Lipscomb, anticipating consumer demand for products bearing what he calls a "poker lifestyle brand," entered the world of licensing.
His licensed products for the World Poker Tour - chips and tables, but also cards, games and apparel - are sold in stores and online. Folding tables sell at Wal-Mart for $100. At Sam's Club, tables cost $500 to $700; chip sets in wooden boxes sell for $100, and a silver tournament set with 300 chips and two decks of cards has a $60 price tag. The new "millionaire's set" sells for $400 on the company's Web site and at some retailers.
Mr. Lipscomb's company had licensing revenue of $1.9 million in the last quarter. "We've seen tremendous growth, quarter to quarter," he said. "It's been very interesting to watch people's appetites become more sophisticated, such as a desire for weighted ceramic chips, like the ones used at casinos."
His best-selling 2004 holiday product was Jakks Pacific TV Games World Poker Tour, a $25 plug-and-play video game, and he is also involved with the marketing for cellphone games through an agreement with the Mforma Group, a wireless company.
"Our research shows that people want to play like the pros, with all the accessories," said Scott Kling, vice president for sales and marketing at the United States Playing Card Company, a World Poker Tour licensee. The company creates official cards, chips, poker sets and foldable poker-table tops. It also produces its own biggest-selling Bicycle brand, as well as the Bee, Aviator and Kem lines; Kem decks sold early this year at Harrod's in London for £48 for a two-pack, or about $44 a deck. Bicycle brand cards cost $2.25 to $4.99 a deck, and Target stores recently introduced powder-blue and powder-pink decks, geared to women.
Not surprisingly, those who sell products and services that help poker lovers improve their game are also thriving.
"I could pursue baseball for the rest of my life, but I'm never going to hit a home run against a major-league pitcher," said Joshua Malina, an executive producer of " Celebrity Poker Showdown," which started in 2003 on Bravo and draws nearly a million viewers. But poker players who develop their skills, he said, might realistically compete with the game's legends.
Jules Herbert, a buyer for Barnes & Noble, said poker book sales increased 84 percent from 2003 to 2004. "Our stores have gone from one or two shelves of poker and gambling titles to a full bay of poker-only titles in some stores," Mr. Herbert said.
Among the favorites, whose prices range from about $20 to $35, are "Doyle Brunson's Super System" and books written by well-known pros. "Reading a book from them is probably the next best thing to playing a game of cards with them," Mr. Herbert said.
Howard Lederer also believes in letting poker fans mingle with the pros. He has just finished being the host of "Howard Lederer's No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em Poker Fantasy Camp" in Las Vegas. For $3,500, which included hotel accommodations at the MGM Grand, two dinners and a show, participants received five hours' worth of seminars with top poker money winners, as well as the chance to participate in two casino tournaments. More than twice as many people signed up for this year's event as for his first event last year.
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Internet gambling bets on cellphones
Published: 2005-05-01
 Internet gambling bets on cellphones
By Mike Hughlett | Chicago Tribune
Posted May 1, 2005
Poker has come to the mobile phone.
The service from PokerRoom.com -- launched in April -- highlights the fast growth and accessibility of online gambling. The business has grown so much that investment bankers are circling the major players seeking lucrative new stock offerings.
Yet any such offerings will not be in the United States -- the result of Internet gambling's great paradox. The U.S. market by far is the world's largest, but the government remains adamantly opposed to Web wagering.
The stance has kept U.S. companies from venturing into a new market, but it hasn't stopped people from betting online. However, the government hasn't shown the will to bust individual bettors.
So the U.S. gets no economic benefit from online gambling yet is still saddled with the potential social cost -- a growing venue for problem gamblers to feed their addiction.
Online gambling is still dwarfed by traditional forms of wagering. Last year, online gamblers comprised about 3.9 percent of the $237 billion global market, according to Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a European investment bank.
But Dresdner's London analysts see online betting rising to 6.5 percent of the total market by 2008. Online poker, an estimated $2.9 billion global business this year, is expected to double in size by 2008, Dresdner forecasts.
Poker is especially fast growing.
The average daily number of players in the Internet's most well-traveled poker rooms zoomed from about 2,400 at the beginning of 2003 to around 60,000 in recent months, according to PokerPulse, a Web site that tracks online-poker sites.
PokerRoom.com appears to be the first Web gambling outfit to allow its game to be downloaded into cellular phones. Other poker sites have been mulling the option, said Sue Schneider, publisher of St. Louis-based Interactive Gaming News.
"It's kind of hard to say how it will take off. You can take up a lot of your allocated [ cellphone minutes] playing poker," she said. That could be expensive, given that airtime is pricier than computer time.
Sweden-based PokerRoom.com is the sixth-biggest Internet card room, though it jockeys back and forth in rank with the fourth- and fifth-placed sites, according to PokerPulse.
PokerRoom.com was created by two Swedish medical-school students with a penchant for poker. Their site started accepting bets in 2001, taking a small percentage -- usually no more than $3 -- off each wager, as is standard in the industry. About 80 percent of the site's customers are in the United States.
Last year, PokerRoom.com's parent company, Ongame, posted sales of $60 million and a tidy operating profit margin of 33 percent. The company is grooming itself for an initial public stock offering, though a final decision hasn't been made, said Patrik Selin, PokerRoom.com's chief executive.
PokerRoom wouldn't be alone in the public markets.
Gibraltar-based PartyGaming, which runs the world's biggest Internet card site, PartyPoker.com, has hired Dresdner to look at an IPO. If PartyGaming goes public, it reportedly would be valued at nearly $5 billion.
Also, two other gambling sites, one based in Gibraltar, the other in London, are considering stock offerings in Great Britain. And Sportingbet, a British online-gambling outfit, saw its stock double last fall after acquiring a leading Internet poker site.
"London is sort of becoming the Silicon Valley of online gaming," said Dennis Boyko, head of Canada-based PokerPulse.
That status could get a boost from a new British law that creates a clear legal framework for online gambling. The law, which went into effect last month, is welcomed by the industry.
"It will be very, very good for us," PokerRoom.com's Selin said. "It's a stamp of approval."
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