Liz L.
10-27-2003, 08:56 PM
A new crowd is saddling up to the table to play an old game of high stakes -- and big mistakes
In cardrooms, online and on TV, the lure of poker is pulling in small-time players
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/27/DD39317.DTL
On his way to work, slim, slick-haired and goateed Antonio Esfandiari, a young San Franciscan wearing sweats and sandals, carries a large red ice chest stuffed with a bounty -- poached wild salmon, stuffed chicken, pasta, spicy tuna rolls, French bread, pears and raspberries, an energy bar and carrot juice.
"I'm going to work a lot today," he explains, as if blowing $50 at Whole Foods is an everyday thing to do.
With that, he steps into a small booth, asks for his safety deposit box, casually removes six chips worth $1,000 each, and moves toward his workstation:
the high-stakes Texas Hold'em game at Lucky Chances in Colma. Here, on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to whenever, the minimum buy-in is a cool grand, and should you feel good about drawing Big Slick, you can bet everything you've got. So what's $50 to avoid a casino steak?
Esfandiari, often, at 24, the youngest player in the room, has decided to be a professional poker player. He is careful to say, however, that he does not consider himself a gambler, describing games that require less skill as "the dark side," inhabited by "the sick f--." Esfandiari says he simply senses opportunity -- to make money off a Vegas lifestyle many young men covet.
That opportunity is poker's recent growing popularity, a trend that has the industry playing all the angles.
The Bay Area's 19 licensed card rooms are adding tables and tournaments as they seduce new players -- from Baby Boomers and retirees looking for camaraderie to degenerates-in-the-making to loose-playing newbies whom Esfandiari calls "the idiot juice." Players in astonishing numbers are logging on to Internet poker, operated by offshore corporations from places like Costa Rica, Antigua and Cyprus. In bookstores, they're buying strategy guides.
Most strikingly, the game is a sudden smash-hit spectator sport on television, fascinating even viewers who have never check-raised with pocket rockets. After ESPN and the Travel Channel cashed in this year, networks including Fox Sports Net and Bravo are starting shows. Some celebrity watchers have even linked Ben Affleck's love of the game -- Esfandiari played with him recently in Southern California -- to his trouble with J-Lo.
And such exposure, completing the circle, has sent viewers into the cardrooms and especially onto the Web -- a cleverly marketed industry that now grosses more than $1 million per day and where poker traffic has increased sixfold since the beginning of the year.
The aura of TV hooked Esfandiari, a native of Tehran whose parents moved to San Jose when he was in third grade. His third-place finish last year at a World Poker Tour event at Lucky Chances has aired repeatedly on the Travel Channel. He won $44,000, but more than that, he won a rep -- people in his world know he was the kid with crap cards bluffing pros. He now wears a tan "Kid 44" visor and plans to play in every televised tournament he can get to.
"I love being on TV," he says. "I was such a dork in high school. All I ever wanted was to be popular. My dream was for someone, someday, to ask for my autograph."
Played by tens of millions of Americans in variations concocted over beer and cigars, poker was invented in the 1800s on Mississippi riverboats, and has always been suffused with macho, Wild West sexiness. In Hold'em, a pair of kings in the hole are "cowboys," an unbeatable hand is the "nuts," and a pair each of aces and eights is the "dead man's hand" -- Wild Bill Hickok saw that particular arrangement of cards ruined when he took a cap in 1876 in a saloon in Deadwood, S.D.
Poker has been legal in California for more than a century because it is considered a game of skill, not of chance. But it didn't start metaphorically emerging from the smoky rooms until 1970, when the late Las Vegas casino owner Benny Binion assembled seven pros for the "World Series of Poker." It was the birth of poker tournaments, which bring a sporting atmosphere and the small chance of a big pot -- a bit of heroin for a lottery-loving world.
"It allows the little guys to play against the world-class players who might only play in a high-cash game, with a chance to win," says Mike Sexton, a veteran pro and a commentator for the World Poker Tour. He also links the expansion of Indian gaming to poker's reach; when the addictive game is available, players turn up.
Fast-forward to this year, and you find 839 entrants from 27 countries who paid $10,000 to play in the Hold'em main event at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. It's the biggest of 35 events at the World Series, and was televised in seven installments on ESPN.
THE OTHER WORLD SERIES
It was at this year's World Series in May that poker was dealt its latest monster hand. Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 entry in an online satellite tournament into the $2.5 million grand prize, and he did it just as people were talking about the influx of so-called dead money. James McManus' "Positively Fifth Street" was on the best-seller lists, detailing the author's improbable fifth-place finish in 2000. McManus had prepared by reading strategy books and playing computer simulations, and he highlighted poker's biggest pitch: With the right cards and a cool head, any home-game hotshot can win.
Binion's chips have trickled down. In recent months, Lucky Chances has seen a 20 to 25 percent increase in competitors in its six tournaments a week, according to poker floor supervisor Esteban Tahmazian. The casino doesn't make much money on tournaments, but "the secret is to get them in here," he says. They'll stay and play in the ordinary, "ring" games, where Lucky Chances typically charges a "rake" of $3 a hand per table.
Poker is best live, where a player can scour an opponent for "tells" that reveal a bluff -- think John Malkovich eating Oreos in the movie "Rounders" -- but it also takes practice, and more amateurs are getting seasoned online.
They are playing in free or penny-ante games, which are intended as a gateway into money games. They are playing in money games, despite fears of collusion -- multiple players rigging a game. And in California, they are playing even though online betting on anything except horse racing is illegal.
They are playing because of Chris Moneymaker's win, technology improvements that bring a fast-paced casino experience to the computer screen, and savvy marketing that portrays poker sites as social communities, says Ron Burke, a manager with a leading site called EmpirePoker. Truly an international pursuit,
it's located in Cyprus and, like many sites, uses an advanced server farm at the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake south of Montreal. Empire studies its customers as a retailer would, personalizing incentives to keep them loyal. A player who recruits a friend gets $50 in chips, and a gambler involved in a marathon session will occasionally see free cash stuffed into his account.
Online tournaments, meanwhile, are offering total purses of as much as $150, 000, and in some cases -- as a way to ratchet up the sexiness factor -- send winners to real-life tournaments, one of which is played on a cruise ship and shown on television.
On average, an estimated 14,000 people around the world are playing Internet poker during any given hour, in ring games and tournaments, according to Dennis Boyko, a Vancouver resident whose PokerPulse tracks 15 of the most popular poker Web sites. That's a sixfold increase since January. In September the sites grossed roughly $1.35 million a day -- not including tournaments, which might provide 10 to 15 percent of revenue, he says, and not including interest made on millions of dollars sitting in accounts. That daily figure was up from $300,000 in January.
Despite the stunning numbers, it is television that may revolutionize poker.
Four years ago, Steve Lipscomb saw the game's potential as a spectator sport while producing a documentary on the 1998 World Series for the Discovery Channel. He united 13 smaller tournaments into the World Poker Tour, and gave them a sporting feel -- with personal profiles of top players, like "soccer mom" Annie Duke of Portland and "Poker Brat" Phil Hellmuth Jr. of Palo Alto.
The key to the series, though, was "lipstick cameras" that sit in front of players and record hole cards. Viewers know when Esfandiari has "American Airlines" -- pocket aces -- or when he is bluffing. Not only that, they are given his exact odds of winning the hand at every step. Even old pros have been blown away by the experience, which has the flavor of reality TV, and leaves some viewers thinking: I could beat these chumps.
"Every time someone shows up at our table, we make them into a star. We do their bio, and we give you enough to root for or against them," says Lipscomb, who dreams that the World Poker Tour will grow to rival the Professional Golfers Association. "What if a guy who plays tennis on the weekend could enter Wimbledon? There's no doubt we will be attracting people to poker."
TOUR IGNITES RATINGS
The first year of the World Poker Tour, shown Wednesday nights from April to June -- months after the tournaments were played -- was the most successful series ever on the Travel Channel. The finale was watched in more than a million homes, and repeats, still shown on Wednesdays, have gotten even bigger ratings. The Travel Channel in August negotiated options for as many as five more seasons, reportedly for as much as $40 million. It also added a one-night special featuring the top six female players, called "Ladies Night," to be aired Dec. 10.
TV poker is cheap to produce -- after all, prize money comes from pooled entry fees -- and ESPN followed the tour's lead, showing Moneymaker's victory in Tuesday-evening installments that ended Aug. 26. The programs averaged 966, 700 households, and peaked at 1.67 million, prompting the channel to show reruns during the week and to continue to show the episodes until the end of the year. It has four more years on a five-year contract with the World Series.
Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving, Fox Sports Net will show, in six back-to-back one-hour episodes, "Showdown at the Sands," a tournament played earlier in the week in Atlantic City. On Dec. 2, Bravo will premiere "Celebrity Poker Showdown," a charity tournament to be shown in six weekly installments in which such stars as Affleck, Coolio and Tom Green will vie for $100,000. Once eliminated, they will comment on one another's skill while in the "Loser's Lounge." Hellmuth, the Palo Alto pro, says he is in negotiations with FX and MTV to appear in programs.
However, poker's increasing exposure on TV worries experts on gambling addiction who don't buy the line that poker isn't on the dark side because it's a game of skill. "Gambling is gambling," says Arnie Wexler, an expert on compulsive gambling in New Jersey and a former addict himself. He says that if more people are watching poker, more people will play, and some will become addicted to gambling.
"They don't build casinos so you can take the money home, and they don't put up these Internet sites so you can go on and win the money," Wexler says.
Bryan Watkins, a 49-year-old San Francisco police officer who lives in Petaluma, admits he lost $5,000 to $10,000 a year playing poker in the late 1990s. But the burly native of Wales, a good-natured man who becomes a gunslinger when he wins some chips, loves the adrenaline release of competition. His knees, after all, are no longer fit for rugby.
"The next best thing to winning big is losing big," he says. "It's a drug like any other drug, and you have to get control of it."
Or you have to win. With Northern Station colleagues glued to Internet updates, Watkins finished 20th and collected $45,000 this year in his first stab at the World Series -- bringing him back to about even. He had won his Las Vegas trip in a satellite tournament at Sonoma Joe's in Petaluma; for next year, two friends have already agreed to put up his $10,000 entry, in exchange for a piece of potential winnings. "I'm having a gas with all of it," Watkins says.
Poker's surge in popularity has enchanted many Bay Area players, from beginners to old hands.
On a recent day, David Ho, a 22-year-old San Jose computer technician, walked into the Bay 101 casino in San Jose with $26, played Hold'em for an hour, then left with $23. Ho says he's been reading about poker strategy every day and has set up a twice-monthly home game with friends. "I already got my wife's mother into it," he says. "Yesterday we were playing, just for fun, and then I got her to watch the World Poker Tour. It was pretty funny."
More advanced is Diego Cordovez, a 38-year-old poker champion from Palo Alto who doesn't want to rely on poker to put food on the table. Earlier this year he founded a company in Redwood Shores that is developing online gaming and payment software. "I don't want my avocation to be my vocation," he says.
Then there is Esfandiari, who might be having more fun than anyone else. Five years ago, while working as a magician, he started taking tip money to Bay 101 and Garden City in San Jose -- at times staying all night. There, he would nervously play the smallest games. In early 2001, he put together a $20, 000 run and immediately blew it at the World Series. But he was hooked, especially after the TV appearance.
In the high-stakes game at Lucky Chances, Esfandiari sits down with eight other men of various ages, including an anxious-looking lawyer, a harried inventor, an information technology consultant, a couple of retirees and a couple of veteran poker pros. It's 4 p.m. and about 500 gamblers are in the casino, more than half on the dark side. It's difficult to know who the most feared players are because Esfandiari regales them all with names like "Doctor, " "Godfather" and "The Guy."
"You're the guy," he says to one. "I'd like to be the guy. Maybe someday I'll be the guy. But I'm not the guy."
Esfandiari now is about as nervous as anyone sitting in an office cubicle. On this day, he loses nearly all of his $6,000 before getting "unstuck" and leaving at 10 p.m., up about $400. But before he starts playing big hands, he reaches into his cooler, spoons a chunk of salmon and some pasta onto a plate, and taps a waitress as she walks by. "Excuse me," he says. "Could you heat this up for me?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE RULES OF THE GAME
-- In no-limit Texas Hold'em -- the "Cadillac of poker" and the game played in the main event of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas -- each player is dealt two hole cards to use and look at privately.
-- Then comes the "flop," or three face-up communal cards.
-- Then comes a fourth communal card, called the "turn" or "Fourth Street," followed by a fifth communal card, known as the "river" or "Fifth Street."
-- Players bet after each step, and the best five-card poker hand wins. At any point, a person can go "all-in," betting every chip.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POKER ON TV
Travel Channel: World Poker Tour repeats, 9-11 p.m. Wednesdays. "Ladies Night," a one-night special featuring six top female players, airs 9-11 p.m. Dec. 10.
ESPN: 2003 World Series of Poker repeats, until end of the year (check local listings).
Bravo: "Celebrity Poker Showdown," a charity tournament to be shown in six weekly one-hour installments in which such stars as Ben Affleck, Coolio and Tom Green will vie for $100,000. Premieres 9 p.m. Dec. 2.Fox Sports Net: "Showdown at the Sands," a tournament played earlier in the week in Atlantic City. Six back-to-back one-hour episodes, 12:30 p.m. Nov. 27 (check local listings).
In cardrooms, online and on TV, the lure of poker is pulling in small-time players
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, October 27, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/27/DD39317.DTL
On his way to work, slim, slick-haired and goateed Antonio Esfandiari, a young San Franciscan wearing sweats and sandals, carries a large red ice chest stuffed with a bounty -- poached wild salmon, stuffed chicken, pasta, spicy tuna rolls, French bread, pears and raspberries, an energy bar and carrot juice.
"I'm going to work a lot today," he explains, as if blowing $50 at Whole Foods is an everyday thing to do.
With that, he steps into a small booth, asks for his safety deposit box, casually removes six chips worth $1,000 each, and moves toward his workstation:
the high-stakes Texas Hold'em game at Lucky Chances in Colma. Here, on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to whenever, the minimum buy-in is a cool grand, and should you feel good about drawing Big Slick, you can bet everything you've got. So what's $50 to avoid a casino steak?
Esfandiari, often, at 24, the youngest player in the room, has decided to be a professional poker player. He is careful to say, however, that he does not consider himself a gambler, describing games that require less skill as "the dark side," inhabited by "the sick f--." Esfandiari says he simply senses opportunity -- to make money off a Vegas lifestyle many young men covet.
That opportunity is poker's recent growing popularity, a trend that has the industry playing all the angles.
The Bay Area's 19 licensed card rooms are adding tables and tournaments as they seduce new players -- from Baby Boomers and retirees looking for camaraderie to degenerates-in-the-making to loose-playing newbies whom Esfandiari calls "the idiot juice." Players in astonishing numbers are logging on to Internet poker, operated by offshore corporations from places like Costa Rica, Antigua and Cyprus. In bookstores, they're buying strategy guides.
Most strikingly, the game is a sudden smash-hit spectator sport on television, fascinating even viewers who have never check-raised with pocket rockets. After ESPN and the Travel Channel cashed in this year, networks including Fox Sports Net and Bravo are starting shows. Some celebrity watchers have even linked Ben Affleck's love of the game -- Esfandiari played with him recently in Southern California -- to his trouble with J-Lo.
And such exposure, completing the circle, has sent viewers into the cardrooms and especially onto the Web -- a cleverly marketed industry that now grosses more than $1 million per day and where poker traffic has increased sixfold since the beginning of the year.
The aura of TV hooked Esfandiari, a native of Tehran whose parents moved to San Jose when he was in third grade. His third-place finish last year at a World Poker Tour event at Lucky Chances has aired repeatedly on the Travel Channel. He won $44,000, but more than that, he won a rep -- people in his world know he was the kid with crap cards bluffing pros. He now wears a tan "Kid 44" visor and plans to play in every televised tournament he can get to.
"I love being on TV," he says. "I was such a dork in high school. All I ever wanted was to be popular. My dream was for someone, someday, to ask for my autograph."
Played by tens of millions of Americans in variations concocted over beer and cigars, poker was invented in the 1800s on Mississippi riverboats, and has always been suffused with macho, Wild West sexiness. In Hold'em, a pair of kings in the hole are "cowboys," an unbeatable hand is the "nuts," and a pair each of aces and eights is the "dead man's hand" -- Wild Bill Hickok saw that particular arrangement of cards ruined when he took a cap in 1876 in a saloon in Deadwood, S.D.
Poker has been legal in California for more than a century because it is considered a game of skill, not of chance. But it didn't start metaphorically emerging from the smoky rooms until 1970, when the late Las Vegas casino owner Benny Binion assembled seven pros for the "World Series of Poker." It was the birth of poker tournaments, which bring a sporting atmosphere and the small chance of a big pot -- a bit of heroin for a lottery-loving world.
"It allows the little guys to play against the world-class players who might only play in a high-cash game, with a chance to win," says Mike Sexton, a veteran pro and a commentator for the World Poker Tour. He also links the expansion of Indian gaming to poker's reach; when the addictive game is available, players turn up.
Fast-forward to this year, and you find 839 entrants from 27 countries who paid $10,000 to play in the Hold'em main event at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. It's the biggest of 35 events at the World Series, and was televised in seven installments on ESPN.
THE OTHER WORLD SERIES
It was at this year's World Series in May that poker was dealt its latest monster hand. Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 entry in an online satellite tournament into the $2.5 million grand prize, and he did it just as people were talking about the influx of so-called dead money. James McManus' "Positively Fifth Street" was on the best-seller lists, detailing the author's improbable fifth-place finish in 2000. McManus had prepared by reading strategy books and playing computer simulations, and he highlighted poker's biggest pitch: With the right cards and a cool head, any home-game hotshot can win.
Binion's chips have trickled down. In recent months, Lucky Chances has seen a 20 to 25 percent increase in competitors in its six tournaments a week, according to poker floor supervisor Esteban Tahmazian. The casino doesn't make much money on tournaments, but "the secret is to get them in here," he says. They'll stay and play in the ordinary, "ring" games, where Lucky Chances typically charges a "rake" of $3 a hand per table.
Poker is best live, where a player can scour an opponent for "tells" that reveal a bluff -- think John Malkovich eating Oreos in the movie "Rounders" -- but it also takes practice, and more amateurs are getting seasoned online.
They are playing in free or penny-ante games, which are intended as a gateway into money games. They are playing in money games, despite fears of collusion -- multiple players rigging a game. And in California, they are playing even though online betting on anything except horse racing is illegal.
They are playing because of Chris Moneymaker's win, technology improvements that bring a fast-paced casino experience to the computer screen, and savvy marketing that portrays poker sites as social communities, says Ron Burke, a manager with a leading site called EmpirePoker. Truly an international pursuit,
it's located in Cyprus and, like many sites, uses an advanced server farm at the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake south of Montreal. Empire studies its customers as a retailer would, personalizing incentives to keep them loyal. A player who recruits a friend gets $50 in chips, and a gambler involved in a marathon session will occasionally see free cash stuffed into his account.
Online tournaments, meanwhile, are offering total purses of as much as $150, 000, and in some cases -- as a way to ratchet up the sexiness factor -- send winners to real-life tournaments, one of which is played on a cruise ship and shown on television.
On average, an estimated 14,000 people around the world are playing Internet poker during any given hour, in ring games and tournaments, according to Dennis Boyko, a Vancouver resident whose PokerPulse tracks 15 of the most popular poker Web sites. That's a sixfold increase since January. In September the sites grossed roughly $1.35 million a day -- not including tournaments, which might provide 10 to 15 percent of revenue, he says, and not including interest made on millions of dollars sitting in accounts. That daily figure was up from $300,000 in January.
Despite the stunning numbers, it is television that may revolutionize poker.
Four years ago, Steve Lipscomb saw the game's potential as a spectator sport while producing a documentary on the 1998 World Series for the Discovery Channel. He united 13 smaller tournaments into the World Poker Tour, and gave them a sporting feel -- with personal profiles of top players, like "soccer mom" Annie Duke of Portland and "Poker Brat" Phil Hellmuth Jr. of Palo Alto.
The key to the series, though, was "lipstick cameras" that sit in front of players and record hole cards. Viewers know when Esfandiari has "American Airlines" -- pocket aces -- or when he is bluffing. Not only that, they are given his exact odds of winning the hand at every step. Even old pros have been blown away by the experience, which has the flavor of reality TV, and leaves some viewers thinking: I could beat these chumps.
"Every time someone shows up at our table, we make them into a star. We do their bio, and we give you enough to root for or against them," says Lipscomb, who dreams that the World Poker Tour will grow to rival the Professional Golfers Association. "What if a guy who plays tennis on the weekend could enter Wimbledon? There's no doubt we will be attracting people to poker."
TOUR IGNITES RATINGS
The first year of the World Poker Tour, shown Wednesday nights from April to June -- months after the tournaments were played -- was the most successful series ever on the Travel Channel. The finale was watched in more than a million homes, and repeats, still shown on Wednesdays, have gotten even bigger ratings. The Travel Channel in August negotiated options for as many as five more seasons, reportedly for as much as $40 million. It also added a one-night special featuring the top six female players, called "Ladies Night," to be aired Dec. 10.
TV poker is cheap to produce -- after all, prize money comes from pooled entry fees -- and ESPN followed the tour's lead, showing Moneymaker's victory in Tuesday-evening installments that ended Aug. 26. The programs averaged 966, 700 households, and peaked at 1.67 million, prompting the channel to show reruns during the week and to continue to show the episodes until the end of the year. It has four more years on a five-year contract with the World Series.
Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving, Fox Sports Net will show, in six back-to-back one-hour episodes, "Showdown at the Sands," a tournament played earlier in the week in Atlantic City. On Dec. 2, Bravo will premiere "Celebrity Poker Showdown," a charity tournament to be shown in six weekly installments in which such stars as Affleck, Coolio and Tom Green will vie for $100,000. Once eliminated, they will comment on one another's skill while in the "Loser's Lounge." Hellmuth, the Palo Alto pro, says he is in negotiations with FX and MTV to appear in programs.
However, poker's increasing exposure on TV worries experts on gambling addiction who don't buy the line that poker isn't on the dark side because it's a game of skill. "Gambling is gambling," says Arnie Wexler, an expert on compulsive gambling in New Jersey and a former addict himself. He says that if more people are watching poker, more people will play, and some will become addicted to gambling.
"They don't build casinos so you can take the money home, and they don't put up these Internet sites so you can go on and win the money," Wexler says.
Bryan Watkins, a 49-year-old San Francisco police officer who lives in Petaluma, admits he lost $5,000 to $10,000 a year playing poker in the late 1990s. But the burly native of Wales, a good-natured man who becomes a gunslinger when he wins some chips, loves the adrenaline release of competition. His knees, after all, are no longer fit for rugby.
"The next best thing to winning big is losing big," he says. "It's a drug like any other drug, and you have to get control of it."
Or you have to win. With Northern Station colleagues glued to Internet updates, Watkins finished 20th and collected $45,000 this year in his first stab at the World Series -- bringing him back to about even. He had won his Las Vegas trip in a satellite tournament at Sonoma Joe's in Petaluma; for next year, two friends have already agreed to put up his $10,000 entry, in exchange for a piece of potential winnings. "I'm having a gas with all of it," Watkins says.
Poker's surge in popularity has enchanted many Bay Area players, from beginners to old hands.
On a recent day, David Ho, a 22-year-old San Jose computer technician, walked into the Bay 101 casino in San Jose with $26, played Hold'em for an hour, then left with $23. Ho says he's been reading about poker strategy every day and has set up a twice-monthly home game with friends. "I already got my wife's mother into it," he says. "Yesterday we were playing, just for fun, and then I got her to watch the World Poker Tour. It was pretty funny."
More advanced is Diego Cordovez, a 38-year-old poker champion from Palo Alto who doesn't want to rely on poker to put food on the table. Earlier this year he founded a company in Redwood Shores that is developing online gaming and payment software. "I don't want my avocation to be my vocation," he says.
Then there is Esfandiari, who might be having more fun than anyone else. Five years ago, while working as a magician, he started taking tip money to Bay 101 and Garden City in San Jose -- at times staying all night. There, he would nervously play the smallest games. In early 2001, he put together a $20, 000 run and immediately blew it at the World Series. But he was hooked, especially after the TV appearance.
In the high-stakes game at Lucky Chances, Esfandiari sits down with eight other men of various ages, including an anxious-looking lawyer, a harried inventor, an information technology consultant, a couple of retirees and a couple of veteran poker pros. It's 4 p.m. and about 500 gamblers are in the casino, more than half on the dark side. It's difficult to know who the most feared players are because Esfandiari regales them all with names like "Doctor, " "Godfather" and "The Guy."
"You're the guy," he says to one. "I'd like to be the guy. Maybe someday I'll be the guy. But I'm not the guy."
Esfandiari now is about as nervous as anyone sitting in an office cubicle. On this day, he loses nearly all of his $6,000 before getting "unstuck" and leaving at 10 p.m., up about $400. But before he starts playing big hands, he reaches into his cooler, spoons a chunk of salmon and some pasta onto a plate, and taps a waitress as she walks by. "Excuse me," he says. "Could you heat this up for me?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE RULES OF THE GAME
-- In no-limit Texas Hold'em -- the "Cadillac of poker" and the game played in the main event of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas -- each player is dealt two hole cards to use and look at privately.
-- Then comes the "flop," or three face-up communal cards.
-- Then comes a fourth communal card, called the "turn" or "Fourth Street," followed by a fifth communal card, known as the "river" or "Fifth Street."
-- Players bet after each step, and the best five-card poker hand wins. At any point, a person can go "all-in," betting every chip.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POKER ON TV
Travel Channel: World Poker Tour repeats, 9-11 p.m. Wednesdays. "Ladies Night," a one-night special featuring six top female players, airs 9-11 p.m. Dec. 10.
ESPN: 2003 World Series of Poker repeats, until end of the year (check local listings).
Bravo: "Celebrity Poker Showdown," a charity tournament to be shown in six weekly one-hour installments in which such stars as Ben Affleck, Coolio and Tom Green will vie for $100,000. Premieres 9 p.m. Dec. 2.Fox Sports Net: "Showdown at the Sands," a tournament played earlier in the week in Atlantic City. Six back-to-back one-hour episodes, 12:30 p.m. Nov. 27 (check local listings).