Pokers New Face

Movie stars and Supreme Court justices do it once a week. Both the titans and the wanna-bes of the business world play it to hone their deal-making skills. With more than 50 million regular players across the country, poker is more popular than golf, tennis or billiards. Poker fever is rampant in America, due in large part to the WORLD POKER TOUR , the television series on the Travel Channel that enters its second season in March 2004, having turned the game into a must-watch spectator sport with its inaugural 2003 run. Feedback from casinos and online poker sites indicates that new players, both male and female, are pouring into their facilities or trying their skills online. And the book club craze that Oprah started may have met its match in spades: the WPT is reported to have spawned many a home poker group.

“Poker is clearly shedding its back room, rough and tough image, as more people find out how intrinsically interesting it can be,” says Steve Lipscomb, creator and co-producer of the WORLD POKER TOUR . “Influentials in Hollywood and the business world have embraced poker as a charismatic game of strategy, psychology and showmanship.” Poker scenes have become more and more frequent in film and television (Las Vegas, Oceans Eleven, Rounders, CSI.) The game is a frequent off-camera ritual for some of Hollywood's hottest, including Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Leonardo di Caprio, Steve Martin, Sarah Jessica Parker, and David Schwimmer, while other celebrities ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to Britain's TV cooking goddess Nigella Lawson are reportedly huge fans of the show.

WORLD POKER TOUR play-by-play commentator Vincent Van Patten literally grew up at the poker table, playing with his father, actor Dick Van Patten and friends Don Adams and Walter Matthau. He says his father taught him to play because he believed if you were a good poker player, you could do anything in life. “It's about making decisions and knowing people,” says the younger Van Patten.

Leaders in business and government seem to agree. Supreme Court justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia have regular games, and Bill Gates says he spent more time playing poker his first year at Harvard than going to classes. According to a New York Times article, poker offers these executives something more than the chance to up their net worth, and that is “the opportunity for players to hone skills of their trade, like assessing risk, reading the faces of business rivals, leveraging their strengths, masking their weaknesses and coping with stress.”

The WORLD POKER TOUR is truly revealing poker's new face, with male and female “stars” who range in age from twenty-something to retiree and represent many different ethnicities and occupations, from soccer Mom to student to stockbroker. The television series has taken poker out of smoky backrooms and placed it squarely in America's living rooms, reinventing the image of the game and its players in the process.

The WORLD POKER TOUR is the first televised series of poker tournaments ever, and the first to reveal players' hole cards to in-studio and television audiences in the U.S. The shows have not only helped make poker as exciting to watch as it is to play, but have also turned the elite players into celebrities in their own right. The show became the highest rated show on the Travel Channel in 2003, and one of the top two ever in the network's history.

Re-runs of the WORLD POKER TOUR'S first season on the Travel Channel on Wednesday nights posted a viewership increase of 30% over their original airings. The WORLD POKER TOUR'S second season – featuring a series of fourteen tournaments filmed before live audiences in casinos across the globe -- will begin airing on the Travel Channel on March 3, 2004, following a special sneak preview tournament on February 4th. In addition, special “bonus” themed episodes will be interspersed throughout the year, along with four Hollywood Home Games, featuring celebrities including Ben Affleck, Jon Favreau, Aisha Tyler, Mimi Rogers, Drew Carey, Jack Black, James Woods and many more.