Diane Williams laughed like a thief.
She
just hit her bellybuster on the river, bet it up and
watched the dealer sweep a pile of chips her way across
the smooth green felt. A grin broke across her face and
she elbowed her sister, Rose, who forced a smile.
A
minute ago, Williams had seemed baffled as she sat with
nine other greenhorns behind a gold curtain inside
Casino San Pablo, where Chuck Cambruzzi, the "Paisan of
Poker," teaches a weekly Poker 101 class for a swelling
crop of eager beginners.
Now,
seduced by success, the 41-year-old Richmond mother
probed the game's ultimate riddle.
"How," she asked, "do you know when they bluffin'?"
Around the pad-rimmed oval, the floodgates opened.
"Are
you going to teach us how to bluff?" wondered Demy
Docena, 63, of Vallejo.
"What about tells?" demanded a school administrator from
Pinole, seeking the physical cues that give away an
opponent's hand.
Mark
Twain would be tickled. The great American writer, who
once complained that the country's neglect of poker was
"enough to make one ashamed of the species," can rest
easy now.
The
nation is flush with poker passion. In home games, local
card rooms and across cyberspace, thousands of newbies
are kicking a populist dent in the game's grizzled,
back-room image.
Players credit the huge popularity of prime-time cable
TV broadcasts that lend high-stakes poker the full
play-by-play and back-story treatment of big-time
sports. The key, say followers, is the cameras that show
the players' hidden "holecards" to viewers, revealing
stern-faced pros or celebrity wannabes in all their
bold, bluffing and bamboozled glory.
"Before," said poker veteran Howard "Tahoe" Andrews of
Walnut Creek, "it was like watching paint dry." Now it's
riveting the nation.
On
ESPN, Bravo and the Travel Channel, poker has driven big
ratings. ESPN, which is now broadcasting the World
Series of Poker, saw an average of 1.2 million viewers
tune in last year to its relentless broadcasts of the
main event.
The
network recently ran a 22-hour poker marathon to lather
up for the new season. It now runs a ticker during
sporting events, counting the hours, minutes and seconds
until poker time.
It
didn't hurt that last year's winner was a 28-year-old
Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker, who came
from obscurity and a $40 stake in an Internet qualifying
tournament to win $2.5 million in the No Limit Texas
Hold'em main event.
The
name alone conjured sweet green thoughts, and his big
win helped spur an explosion in online poker play, said
Dennis Boyko of PokerPulse.com, which tracks Internet
poker activity.
Since then, the money changing hands in regular online
poker games has risen fivefold, to $100 million a day,
Boyko says. In early 2003, an average of 2,200 people
were online playing poker for money at any moment, day
or night. Now it's 29,000.
"The
big event was when Moneymaker came on the scene," said
Boyko. "It's totally shocking. I certainly didn't
foresee anything like this in the cards."
Another measure of the poker craze: Bruce Roberts,
president of the California Council on Problem Gambling,
said he received an e-mail recently from a high school
student in Virginia who said students were playing
Hold'em, for $20 a pop, at lunchtime.
"Sooner or later," said Roberts, "there's going to be a
fallout."
Several groups have pushed the cable networks to air
public service announcements on gambling addiction. The
warnings, so far, have fallen on thousands of deaf ears.
In
the United States, an estimated 50 million people play
some poker at least casually. The cable shows simply
tapped a sleeping giant, said Dan Goldman, vice
president of marketing for PokerStars.com, one of the
top online poker sites.
"Now
they watch something like the World Poker Tour, and
think, 'I can sit down with Chris Moneymaker or another
top pro, and on a given day I can win,'" said Goldman.
"It's not like soccer, where they'd have to go out and
actually learn the game."
Federal officials say operating online gambling sites is
illegal in the United States. Gambling online may be
illegal -- the law is gray -- but the feds have not
pursued individual online players.
Most
Internet gaming firms are based in the United Kingdom,
South America and the Caribbean. PokerStars.com calls
Costa Rica home, but like dozens of similar sites, its
computer servers run from an Indian reservation on the
shores of the Saint Lawrence River south of Montreal.
Most
new players stick to low stakes. But with the boom in
online poker, and Moneymaker's success, a new breed has
swarmed to the big games.
The
World Series championship, open to anyone who ponies up
the $10,000 buy-in, drew 839 players to the table last
year. This year's field was 2,576, with the winner
taking $5 million.
Andrews, who finished in 174th place and won $15,000,
called it "mind-boggling." The 69-year-old player owns a
pair of coveted gold bracelets from World Series
tournament wins in 1976. He recalls when the main event
drew all of 32 players to Binion's Horseshoe Casino in
Las Vegas.
"It's a big ego thing to play in the World Series and
all this TV," he said in a telephone interview from Las
Vegas. Now, when he walks into card clubs or casino
rooms, Andrews sees more cocky upstarts, some more cocky
than capable. "I don't look for them, but they show up.
Some of these guys are so stupid, they just tell me what
they have,'" said Andrews. "I keep telling people, it's
a good thing to stay away from. There are a lot of good
players waiting like vultures."
The
appeal of the game is simple enough, said Maureen
O'Sullivan, a University of San Francisco psychologist
who studies the detection of nonverbal deception.
"It's just the besting of someone. If you get the money
and you fool somebody, you have really beat them. You
have shamed them," she said. "Even if you get shamed
yourself, it still is psychologically arousing. Your
emotional system is triggered."
Local card clubs, including Casino San Pablo and the
Oaks Card Club in Emeryville, have seen a wave of new
players schooled not in bars or back alleys, but through
TV, books and the Internet. Rick Cook, a poker floor
manager at Casino San Pablo, said the average age in the
club's Hold'em tournaments has dropped from around 55 to
30.
Younger players, including many UC Berkeley students,
are taking to the clubs, which stay open 24 hours. The
new flock are "more savvy than most beginners," said
Cook, "but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
Adding to the popular appeal, the most frequently
televised game also is one of poker's easiest to
understand, on the surface.
In
Texas Hold'em, players make the best five-card hand from
their two "down" cards and five community cards laid
face up in three stages for all players to use: the
first three ("the flop"), the fourth ("the turn") and
finally the fifth ("the river"). Betting takes place
before and after each round.
In
no-limit Hold'em, players can bet all of their chips at
any time.
"It
will take you five minutes to learn and 20 years to get
really good at," said Cook.
Rose
McCallister is not there yet, but she's working on it.
At
her office job and at home in Richmond, on weekends or
after putting her 4-year-old daughter to sleep, she
sidles up to the computer.
By
her count, she plays about 40 hours of poker a week. She
grew up playing Pitty Pat as a kid, and until she
started into poker last year, she thought Bingo was fun.
Soon, maybe in a few months, she hopes to test her skill
at a real table.
"I
just want to be able to walk into a casino and know what
I'm doing," said McCallister, 41. "It's got to be fun to
know you can play this game and walk away with
somebody's money."
Then
she swiveled her chair to her computer screen at work.
She examined the flop. Nuthin'. Folding -- click -- she
waited for a better deal.
Poker by the numbers:
Poker lingo
Lingo for Hold'em starting hands:
• Walking sticks: Two
sevens
