TEXAS HOLDEM ONLINE POKER

Poker player Barry Shulman is riding a tidal wave of proportions he never expected.

Shulman, a retired real estate developer from Seattle who settled in Las Vegas "to play a little golf and play a little poker," bought a little-known poker magazine called Card Player in 1998. So far this year, the circulation of the magazine has expanded beyond casinos and card rooms to include major bookstore chains, airports and even Wal-Mart stores.

"I bought Card Player when it wasn't for sale. It was clear to me that (poker) was ready to explode but I had no clue that it was going to explode like it did last year," Shulman said.

Shulman is one of more than 9,000 people expected to play in the World Series of Poker, which kicks off the first of 32 public games today at Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas. Thursday, the Horseshoe hosted a poker game open only to casino workers that attracted several hundred people.

The granddaddy of poker tournaments, the World Series is the largest continuously held poker event in the world and is reaping the benefit of the whirlwind popularity of the game. The series is known for its final championship event -- a $10,000 buy-in game of Texas holdem poker -- that is expected to draw more than 1,200 players, up from 839 entrants last year.

To accommodate the crowd, Horseshoe operator Harrah's Entertainment Inc. will hold the first game of the championship over the course of two days beginning May 22, essentially splitting players into two camps that are weeded out in the first round. That way, officials say, the small Horseshoe casino can accommodate up to 2,000 championship players, double the capacity of last year's single day event.

Like Shulman, the man overseeing that effort for Harrah's this year, Howard Greenbaum, has also witnessed a sea change with the advent of the poker craze.

"After Harrah's took over the Horseshoe, my boss called me into his office and told me, 'Your life's about to change,' " said Greenbaum, whose "director of race and sports book" title at Harrah's didn't include the word "poker" until now.

Greenbaum will have help in the form of two tournament directors -- one more than last year -- who specialize in organizing poker tournaments and have been involved in past World Series of Poker events.

Harrah's has also hired some 230 dealers who are selected from a pool of people who deal poker at tournaments worldwide. Attracting enough dealers wasn't a problem, Greenbaum said.

"It's considered an honor to be affiliated with the World Series of Poker and deal for it," he said.

Existing Horseshoe workers also will get a chance to deal poker during the series as they are rotated in and out of games dealt by contract dealers, he said. Most of the casino's dealers have returned to work after the property was sold from longtime owner Becky Binion Behnen to MTR Gaming Group, though some left for other jobs after the property shut down, he said. Behnen is the daughter of Horseshoe founder and Texas gambler Benny Binion.

Binion's Horseshoe was forced to close the property Jan. 9 after a raid on its casino cage for money owed to the Culinary Union. Harrah's offered to run the property as part of a deal to secure rights to the Horseshoe brand in Nevada. The property reopened April 1.

The change in ownership has been welcomed by poker veterans such as Larry Grossman, who hosts a local radio talk show on gambling.

"I think it's a breath of fresh air," Grossman said. "Becky had a lot of people angry with her -- the poker dealers, the poker players. They're happy there's a new regime in there."

Poker, admittedly, is not Harrah's forte. Of all the major gaming companies, Harrah's is especially known for its emphasis on slot machine play and has developed sophisticated tools to track and reward frequent gamblers.

Grossman said Harrah's has been shrewd in "hiring people who know the game" to man the event and will be using dealers who have long dealt for the World Series.

"It's not as if Harrah's is coming in and they don't know what they're doing. They have a tremendous property and they're going to make sure that this locomotive going down the track stays on course," he said.

That locomotive is anticipated to boost revenue for downtown as well as Strip casinos, bosses say.

Across town, the Bellagio hotel-casino will host the final championship table tonight for another poker tournament called the World Poker Tour. The tour, organized something like golf's PGA Tour, is credited with kick-starting much of the popularity surrounding poker through its televised series.

The World Poker Tour -- consisting of more than a dozen tournament games held in different casinos worldwide -- airs on the Travel Channel cable network and was the first show in the United States to show gamblers' cards as they played them by use of a small table-top camera.

The tour's first series began airing March 2003 and the second series -- after the final game today -- begins later this year.

The effect of the show on poker and other business at the Bellagio and other casinos in town was almost immediate, said Doug Dalton, the Bellagio's director of poker operations.

The World Poker Tour grabbed headlines this week when it announced that the Bellagio tournament had generated the largest-ever poker prize pool ($8.6 million) as well as the largest first prize in American sports ($2.7 million). It also remains one of the most expensive buy-in games in poker (343 entrants paying $25,000 each compared to 111 entrants last year).

The World Series of Poker is anticipated to smash that record with its own championship event, pundits say. The series will be broadcast again by ESPN this year, which last year followed the World Poker Tour's lead and began to show gamblers' "hole cards" to viewers before each round of betting.

ESPN expects to air 22 one-hour "episodes" on World Series of poker games. The network, which will be handling the programming for the series in-house this year, will be taking the "best of what's going on each week" at the tournament and packaging it in a user-friendly way for viewers, network spokeswoman Keri Potts said.

Allowing viewers to see gamblers' hands of cards transformed the game from a boring event on television to an exciting, modern-day drama along the lines of reality TV, Schulman said.

"TV has shown how interesting it can be. And it's different from other games of skill. I can't go to the Masters and play golf with the pros but I can put up my money and have a shot at winning," he said.

Case in point is last year's World Series champion, Chris Moneymaker, experts say. He was an unknown before he emerged on the scene after practicing in Internet card rooms.

The online gambling boom also is fueling the trend, experts say. Online poker rooms began as a cottage industry years ago and now at least 50 vie for attention in cyberspace. Most use the World Series of Poker to promote their sites by allowing players to gamble for a shot at a paid entry to the championship.

Another recent milestone came this year when an Internet poker site, www.primapoker.com, announced it would bankroll a group of four professional players from Britain to the tune of $1 million. The money will pay for expenses and buy-ins to major tournaments worldwide, including the World Series of Poker.

"It's every poker player's dream," said Barny Boatman, a member of the sponsored poker team. "It's life changing beyond recognition."

For now, the poker craze shows no sign of slowing down.

"A couple of years ago I said it was going to be the cigars of this era after (the popularity of cigars) came and went," Grossman said.