Orlando Sentinel Poker Article

[Cubswin]

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Poker's new face
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By Michael McLeod
Sentinel Staff Writer

August 3, 2003

They look awfully cool for two guys in the middle of a high-stakes poker game.

No poker faces. No loudmouth guests smoking fat cigars to stink up the drapes. No money on the table, not to mention: no cards.

If anything, Laurence Samuels and Matt Merdian resemble air traffic controllers as they stare at an array of three computer screens late on a Sunday afternoon,
sitting side by side in the sunlit study of Merdian's home in east Orlando.

But each computer is connected to a Web site in Costa Rica, hooking the two best friends and business partners to a high-stakes game and 806 other players, all of whom are hoping for a sizable share of the pot: $161,800.

Nobody's ever going to mistake poker for bridge. But the gentrification of what was once known as "the cheater's game" is clearly at hand.

The last person to win the World Series of Poker, the game's equivalent of the Masters Tournament, was an accountant. The latest best seller about the game was
written by an English professor. Once, the only way to get into a high-stakes poker game was to sidle up to a burly guy with stubble and mob connections. Now
you're a mouse click away.

Samuels is focused on one terminal, watching his virtual cards appear on the screen, betting accordingly. His actions, and the bets of all the other players, register on a video mock-up of a green felt card table, viewed from overhead, as if through the camera of some back-room casino security system.

Meanwhile, on the two other terminals, Merdian watches other games being played at other virtual tables, trying to see what strategy other players are using.

The two friends play as a team, judiciously, folding nine times out of ten, watching players who take too many chances lose all their virtual chips. Their own strategy is to play "tight," take few chances, and thus survive until well into the late stages of the tournament and finish in the money.

They do fairly well, outlasting the likes of Mr. Gutshot, Dr. Evil and Mark the Shark -- the online monikers of some of the players in the tournament. One particularly crafty player goes by "Brenda." Merdian and Samuels know that
"Brenda" is actually a man, who is not suffering a gender identity crisis but knows that if other players start flirting with him, it makes it that much easier to steal a pot or two.

This tournament has a much higher payoff than most. First place will rake in $30,000. Even someone who finishes as low as the 63rd spot will take in several hundred.

Merdian is pumped. "We think we can win this thing," he says.

Samuels, the older of the two, interjects a note of caution.

"Long as we don't make any big mistakes," he says.

As it happens, they don't. But it does them no good in the end. Luck is one of the constants of poker. They are eliminated halfway through the tournament in a hand they play perfectly. Another player makes a lucky draw and winds up with three of a kind.

They had been just a few hands shy of winding up in the money.

Close, but no cigar.

Wild cards in the early days

Poker started out with a crooked reputation, and for the next two centuries showed no inclination to live it down.

The game originated in this country as a way to pass the time aboard 19th century riverboats. So many card sharks lurked among the muddy waters that poker soon earned that "cheater's game" nickname.

Its first patron saint, Sheriff "Wild Bill" Hickok, gained that distinction by being shot dead in the middle of a game, a shameful act of violence and a waste of a promising hand: two pair, aces over eights.

The riverboat gamblers and Wild Bill's demise seemed to set a tone. For years, most professional poker players were hard-bitten Texas rounders who led a bleary-eyed, lonely, fundamentally unhealthy existence, occasionally following
in Wild Bill's footsteps. In the 1980s, two of the game's greatest players, Tom Abdo and Jack Straus, had heart attacks in smoke-filled rooms, keeling over onto green felt tables with cards in their hands.

Those days are gone.

"We saw this coming a long time ago," says Phil Hellmuth, a baby-faced, Southern California professional poker player who quotes Buddha on his Web site. He says his family is more important than the next poker hand, and claims he can find the good in anyone -- even other poker players.

Poker players, virtual and otherwise, are having their appetite for action whetted by the Poker World Tour, a televised series of high-stakes poker tournaments on the Travel Channel. The series -- the first season is in reruns
in various time slots -- was the brainchild of filmmaker Steve Lipscomb, who became fascinated by professional poker when he was making a documentary about the game for the History Channel.

Eventually, Lipscomb thought he saw a chance to make poker user-friendly to television viewers. "I wondered, how do we make this into a televised sport?"

His answer was to show people who's bluffing, and who's not. The show heightens the drama -- and provides insights into the art and craft of high-pressure bluffing -- by providing viewers with a look at every player's hole cards (the cards other players can't see). Tension is high, and so are the stakes: Winners of World Poker Tour events can walk off with half a million or more.

Lipscomb made eight episodes and is already filming a second season for next year.

The combination of increased television coverage and the rise of Internet poker sites has narrowed the gap between the friendly neighborhood game and the high-stakes tournaments the pros play.

With hundreds of Internet games available every week, hobbyists can hone their skills by playing online, any hour of the day, either for big money or for relatively small "buy-in" amounts.

The stakes are still high

But they may not be as safe as they think they are. In its own way, the Internet is as much of a wild frontier as the one that Wild Bill helped tame.

Researchers who investigate problem gambling say opening up the Internet to casino games such as blackjack and poker makes gambling more accessible to people for whom gambling becomes an addiction.

The Internet connection has played into an increase of gambling among young people: Surveys show that one of 10 adolescent boys has engaged in some form of gambling. Isolation is a factor in problem gambling -- people with addictive tendencies tend to withdraw from friends and other activities -- and the Internet can facilitate that problem. "You get this picture of a guy sitting all
alone in his underwear at 4 a.m., $5,000 in the hole," says Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

With poker, there is also another issue that hearkens back to the game's riverboat days: cheating. Some of the cheating involves Internet sites that come and go quickly -- and disappear without paying off winners. Internet games have
been plundered by hackers who tap into the software that deals the cards, and by teams of players who hook into the same game and collaborate to win the pot.

Lawmakers have been trying to figure out how to regulate Internet gambling ever since it appeared, without much success.

It is a nebulous area. Strictly speaking, gambling is regulated state to state -- in Florida, any private card game with stakes over $10 is illegal. That law is not especially popular and all but impossible to enforce. For example, serious Orlando poker players know of a certain suburban house where they can show up two nights a week for free sandwiches, drinks and a $100 buy-in poker game, run by a local entrepreneur.

Enforcing the law against that sort of thing is a challenge. When it comes to cyberspace, the quandary is cubed. Former Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth was one of the first to acknowledge that, in a 1995 opinion:
"Evolving technology appears to be far outstripping the ability of government to regulate gambling activities on the Internet. Thus, resolution of these matters must be addressed at the national level."

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has proposed legislation banning Internet gambling. Last month, the House voted in favor of a bill that would make life much harder for Internet gambling sites, prohibiting using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to pay for online wagers. But the process has been stymied by special interest groups such as casinos and race tracks, not to mention the particular legal difficulties posed by the Internet.

"The problem is all these sites are operating outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States," says Tony Cabot, a Las Vegas lawyer who specializes in gaming law. "They're going to be extremely difficult to regulate."

The most popular version of new-age poker is called Texas Hold 'em. The game calls for each player to be dealt two cards, face down. Then five "community" cards are turned face-up in the middle of the table. Each player is allowed to incorporate any of the community cards to make up a hand. Whoever can make the best hand out of the hole cards and the five community cards wins.

One of the effects of the Internet sites and the interest stirred up by the Travel Channel show is that casino poker tournaments, once dominated almost exclusively by professionals, have been invaded by well-schooled amateurs who occasionally get lucky.

It's like a fantasy baseball camp without the Bengay.

Amateurs get into the game

Poker's most recent Cinderella story was an aptly named 27-year-old Tennessee accountant, Chris Moneymaker, who started off with Internet games and played his way into the World Series Of Poker last May. The tournament is the game's
equivalent of the NBA Finals.

"I bluffed a lot," says Moneymaker. He also won the tournament -- and $2.5 million.

Lady luck is a great equalizer. Few games give neophytes the chance to beat a pro. "It's one of the great things about poker," says professional poker player Annie Duke of Montana, who has managed to maintain a lucrative poker career and raise four children, with her husband's help, over the past 10 years. "Short term, an amateur can play me, and on that day, if they are lucky, they can win."

Duke and other old-guard professional players say they don't mind the influx of amateurs into the game. "There is what they call a poker economy," she says. The economy expands according to how many players are out there to win -- and lose -- money.

Moneymaker is by no means the first amateur player to polish his game on the Internet and wind up staring down the pros. Two years ago, author and literature professor James McManus entered the poker World Series, held at Binion's casino in Las Vegas, to write a magazine article about it. He wound up winning more than $200,000 at the tables, and crafted a book about his experiences: Positively Fifth Street -- Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker, which was published earlier this year.

"What's going on with poker is that the baby-boom generation has discovered it," says McManus. "People who have reached an age where they can't compete quite as
well on the tennis court any more have found a place for their competitive juices."

In the meantime, the Old West flavor that once suffused the game is gradually disappearing, chased away by Internet tutorials and software programs that teach neophyte gamblers how to use percentages instead of a steely gaze to intimidate opponents.

Junior Samples, general sales manager at the Adesa Auto Auction in Ocala, says that's not near as much fun.

Samples likes being there. He doesn't play on line. He prefers to make trek to casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere several times a year, even though it's far more expensive -- "I've won tens of thousands, but I've lost tens of thousands more," he says.

But he relishes the chance to notice the subtle physical giveaways that poker players call "tells" -- habits other players have that can give a canny opponent a chance to figure out what they've got in their hands. How fast they are breathing. Whether they're sitting up straight or slouching. The look in their eyes.

He's been able to strike up friendships with the likes of T.J. Cloutier, one of the last of the tough-as-nails road warriors, a throwback to the old-style professional poker player who learned the game in Texas back rooms where most of the players were carrying guns.

Virtual doesn't cut it for Samples. He likes the real world. "The only thing that gets me going is major tournament action," he says. "You can't beat it for
drama. You can be the best poker player in the universe and still get annihilated on any give day. But in the long run, skill will win out over luck. What you need most of all is patience."

Patience? Who can afford to be patient in times like these? Merdian, the Orlando Realtor, says he's been involved in a few long-winded Internet games where some players, their virtual chips dwindling, their time running short, have to excuse themselves from the table.

"I've been on games when you'll get a message from one of the other players -- "Here, you can take my chips. I gotta go to work."

Michael McLeod can be reached at mmcleod@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5432.


Copyright (c) 2003, Orlando Sentinel

[Bama Boy]

Who's Phil trying to fool?