It’s a Full House in Poker Rooms Across Las Vegas
It’s a weekday afternoon in the poker room at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, and something strange is going on: It’s packed.
The 30 tables wedged into a far corner of the casino are filled, mostly with young and middle-aged men clicking chips and shuffling cards, as a line of people waiting to ante up spills out the door.
“The game has been revived,” said Bill Thompson, a public administration professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of a gambling encyclopedia. “Until the last four or five years, [poker] had sort of been an old man’s game for Friday nights.”
But thanks to televised tournaments and a handful of celebrity card sharks lending glamour to the game, poker has exploded into popular culture -- forcing Vegas casinos to jump on the bandwagon.
Caesars Palace is expected to announce plans to open its first poker room in more than a decade. The MGM Grand will reopen its poker room -- closed for years -- in late March. Bally’s unveiled new poker tables this summer, and the Mirage added seven more tables to the 24 it already had. Several other casinos on the Strip are considering expanding their poker operations or creating new ones.
“You can’t find a casino in Vegas that isn’t scrambling to open up a poker room in order to get people in it,” said Steven Lipscomb, creator of the televised World Poker Tour and president of WPT Enterprises.
Most players deal in Texas hold ‘em, seven-card stud or Omaha, with bets starting at a few dollars and reaching thousands of dollars.
Don McGhie, a gaming consultant, said that poker accounted for just a small percentage of a casino’s profits and that the rooms were usually buried in casinos’ nooks and crannies.
To make money off poker, a game where the players are competing against one another, the casinos skim a percentage of a table’s winnings, charge a fee per hand or, in higher-stakes games, for the time a table is used.
But expanding poker offerings isn’t just about cashing in; it also entices a new generation of gamblers to Sin City.
“Poker is more of an experience,” said Scott Ghertner, director of sports and promotions for MGM Mirage.
And it’s a safe bet that some poker players will wander into the craps and blackjack pits -- pouring easy money into casino coffers -- when they’re not holding out for the next flush.
“It’s such a popular game right now; it’s driving a lot of patrons into these properties,” said Dennis Neilander, chairman of the Nevada gaming control board.
Which explains why major casinos in Vegas and beyond are striving to make seven-card Texas hold ‘em or nine-card Omaha available to the growing ranks of neophyte gamblers.
As the game favored by cowboys and World War II soldiers faded in popularity, many casinos folded their poker rooms in the 1990s, replacing them with more lucrative slot machines, Thompson said.
But the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker -- where regular-guy amateurs have taken home championship millions -- and Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown” have hooked a new, younger viewing audience on the classic card game. The WPT’s “Battle of Champions,” which aired on NBC in February, drew an estimated 10 million viewers.
“It just exploded,” said Jack McClelland, poker tournament director at the Bellagio and a 28-year industry veteran. Lipscomb described the game’s renaissance as a “social phenomenon.”
Where the World Series of Poker competition at Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel & Casino used to draw several hundred contestants, this year more than 2,500 card players raised the stakes, competing for nearly $50 million in prize money.
The World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel, which employs a tiny camera that reveals players’ face-down “hole” cards, went from 14 tournaments and $10 million in prize money in 2002-03 to 16 planned tournaments worth a total of $70 million this year.
“Real people can relate to it,” McClelland said. “They can see it happening to them.”
That’s just what professional poker player Jake Warren, 54, likes to hear.
“That’s the beauty.... You have hundreds and hundreds that come in every day and see it on TV and think they can play, and 99.9% go home a loser,” said Warren, roaming around the Bellagio in a black leather jacket and baseball cap waiting for a table.
Novices try to sharpen their skills by watching pros bluff their way to victory in televised tournaments or by joining the millions of players who each day place $166 million in online bets on hundreds of poker sites, according to industry tracker Pokerpulse.com. Sites are pulling in $4.5 million daily in usage fees, up from $300,000 in January 2003, founder Dennis Boyko said.
And for established brick-and-mortar poker operations, business is booming.
“We’ve seen an influx of new business in the last two years,” said John Griffo, casino development manager at Commerce Casino, home to the world’s largest poker room: 180 tables.
Griffo estimated that low-limit Texas hold ‘em business at Commerce has increased 20%; Lipscomb estimated 30% to 50% boosts at casino stops on the World Poker Tour. “It’s the young, hip thing to do,” Griffo said.
For Vegas in particular, poker’s resurgent coolness has brought a buzz back.
“It gives excitement to the town,” UNLV’s Thompson said. “This is a way of tapping the 20- and 30-[year-old] crowd. It’s a way of legitimizing” the game.
You don’t have to tell that to veteran player Pat Callihan, 74, a retired oil company executive sporting a cowboy hat, suspenders, fresh Wranglers and a sizable gold cross around his neck, perched in the high-stakes section at the Bellagio. He’s relieved his grandkids can finally tell friends, without embarrassment, what he does for a living. And he welcomes all those fresh-faced players with open arms.
“If they keep playing with the old pros every day, we’ll eventually get their money,” he said, raking in $1,100 worth of chips with a laugh.