Playing your cards right

PRIME examines the poker phenomenon By Debbie Gardner PRIME Editor The Flop, the Turn, The River ... if these terms sound foreign to you, then you've not yet been swept up by the latest craze. It's POKER man Texas Hold 'Em to be exact and it's being played everywhere from local Lions Club fund-raisers to the World Poker Tour, televised every Wednesday night on cable TV's Travel channel. Gone are the days when this ubiquitous card game was the bastion of cowboy movie saloon scenes and the butt of jokes about guys and their Friday night games. Today poker is hot, it's hip, and it's everywhere. Are you ready to ante up? What? You haven't played yet? A quick check of just one Internet search engine, Google, by this reporter turned up 1,080,000 poker-related websites, covering everything from how to start your own poker web site to comparisons of online games to blogs and discussions of play. "It's absolutely amazing what's happening ... I think [poker] is the most significant pop culture phenomenon of the decade," Eddie Kleid, co-publisher of the recently launched Bluff magazine told PRIME during a recent telephone interview. Bluff, the first-of-its-kind poker lifestyle magazine, published 9,000 copies of its inaugural issue in September 2004. With the June/July issue, Kleid told PRIME his startup trend-watcher magazine has reached 245,000 copies, and will go monthly in August. (Get your own copy of Bluff at almost anyplace that sells magazines, including Stop & Shop.) "Wherever you go, you hear someone talking about poker," Bluff co-publisher Eric Morris commented. "It's incredible. It's not something you would have seen two or three years ago." Not your father's game But let's face it, playing poker isn't anything new. People like 70-year-old Bob Breveglieri, formerly of Agawam, have been playing for years. "I started playing cards when I was about seven years old and I've played ever since. I really enjoy it," Breveglieri told PRIME during a telephone interview from his current home in Florida. Originally a big pinochle player, Breveglieri said he started playing poker years ago. "It was seven card stud [back then], or a game called in and out ... you had to bet or get out," Breveglieri recalled. He said back then poker was just a house game, or garage game, as satirized by comics and early TV sitcoms like The Honeymooners. "There were no poker parlors in the East [back then], only in the West," he said. Now, Breveglieri noted, you can play poker almost anywhere, including the big new parlor at Foxwoods casino in Ledyard, Conn., and the $2 poker parlors he frequents at the dog track near his new Florida home. So, this reporter wondered, what's behind the meteoric rise in poker's popularity? According to Bluff's Eddy Kleid, there are four distinct forces that have helped push poker into the forefront of popular culture. But mostly, he said, it's the Moneymaker effect. When an unknown from Tennessee wins the World Series of Poker, people sit up and take notice. Flush-ing out a trend "It's not just [the recent] TV coverage that has made poker so popular," Kleid said, referring to the explosion of tournament coverage, celebrity games and the advent of the lipstick camera, which lets viewers see every player's hold cards. "It's four things." #1 The explosion of online poker sites, such as Pacificpoker.com, where you can learn how to play for free. "It used to be that if you wanted to play [poker] you had to get seven or eight buddies together," Kleid said. "Now, you can play anytime on your computer." #2 The rise of poker celebrities, such as the Devilfish and the Unabomber, on the televised tournaments. "They have colorful personalities, and people are starting to have their favorite poker players," Kleid continued. #3 The chance that "anybody can be a star." "People are playing for the dream," Bluff's Eric Morris noted. "I'm 34 years old and I'll never be a superstar on the Red Sox ... I'm too old and I'm not too good [a baseball player]," Kleid said. "But I can be a poker superstar ... anybody can be the next poker superstar on the World Series of Poker." #4 The Moneymaker effect. "In 2003, Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker. He was an accountant from Tennessee," Kleid said. "He played with the best poker players [in the world] and he won $2.5 million ... that really opened people's eyes." Kleid explained that Moneymaker's tale (no pun intended!) was a real Cinderella story ... the guy bought into an online satellite tournament for $50 and proceeded to win a seat at the '03 World Series of Poker. Once at the Series, the Tennessee accountant outbluffed and outbet the best of the best to take home the $2.5 million pot. "A combination of luck and skill got him there," Kleid said of Moneymaker's victory. "And now, everyone is saying 'anyone can do this'." So, who's really playing? A traumatic brain injury recovery unit in Tennessee uses poker as a therapy tool. Texas Hold 'Em tournaments have become the hot way to raise funds for everything from local civic organizations to major charities. A Boomer-age colleague at Reminder Publications told me that some of the women at the campsite she visits decided they wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and asked one of the guys to teach them how to play Hold 'Em. They spent the better part of a day engrossed in a game. Reminder Publications' managing editor said his nephew took a poker set with him to college. "A lot of my friends play, a lot of my friend's parents play ... it spans the generations," 29-year-old Derek Williamson, Rehab Director at Chestnut Hill Rehabilitation Center in East Longmeadow told PRIME when we contacted him about a poker tournament the facility was hosting as a fund-raiser for the Alzheimer's Association. "It's just interesting to see how wide [the appeal] is," he said. And we haven't even mentioned the thousands of people who boot up their computers every day and play online. "When you watch TV the pros will say they play online tournaments all day long," Williamson noted. "It's good practice." "A lot of people go online to learn to play [poker], Breveglieri said. "It costs like $20 to play and it teaches them what they can do." (Note: a web site called www.pacificpoker.com offers a tutorial where visitors can learn to play Texas Hold 'Em for free.) But this reporter's 23-year-old nephew, Michael Wayner, who has played poker both in person and on the Internet, said polishing your poker skills almost exclusively online does leave a player with a disadvantage. "You can always tell someone who plays online a lot," Wayner said. "They play their cards. They don't play the people at the table. They miss the tells." Williamson said that for serious players, online poker has another pitfall. "There's an opportunity for cheating," he said. Playing your cards right In an effort to better understand this cultural phenomena, this reporter asked her nephew Michael to give her a quick tutorial in Texas Hold 'Em. In about 20 minutes he taught her the basics of this deceptively simple to play but hard to master card game. As author Bill Burnton explains in his Texas Hold 'Em 101 tutorial, found on the web site About.com (http://casinogambling.about.com/cs/poker/aTexasHoldem101.htm), Texas Hold 'Em is a seven card game where each player is dealt two personal cards and the dealer turns five community cards. The object is to make the best five-card hand possible out of a combination of your cards and the community cards. Oh, were it only that easy. You see ... this reporter isn't much of a card player. With Mike's help she worked to master which pairs of cards are stronger on the initial deal (e.g Ace-Ace, King-King, Ace-King suited) what combinations of cards beat what, the difference between the small blind (initial bet by player to the dealer's left this is always half of the agreed-upon bet in a Limit game) and the big blind (bet that matches the game limit), how to check, when to raise and call, and most importantly, when your cards are garbage and it's time to fold. (By the way, for the one or two of you out there who haven't played yet those first bets are called blinds because they're made before a player sees his or her first two cards, which are in turn called hole cards). She also learned the nicknames of some common poker hands (e.g. a Queen and a Jack is called a Maverick, a Ten and a Five is called a Five and Dime). After about two hours of play, this reporter could say she slowly got the hang of betting and bluffing. She figured out whether to raise or check on the first round, how to evaluate the community cards and the other players on the Flop (the three cards the dealer turns) and Turn (fourth card the dealer turns), and how to figure what or if she should risk at the River (fifth dealer card) and the Showdown (final accounting). (Having been a Cribbage player for many years really messed up her thinking!). She also got a feel for how to read "tells" those involuntary movements and expressions players make when they get dealt a good or bad hand. ... And she realized she'd be a lousy player in a tournament because she reflexively raises her right eyebrow when her hand seems to hold good cards. (No wonder those poker celebs on TV wear tinted glasses, or, in the case of the hooded sweatshirt-wearing player called the Unabomber, actually cover up their faces to control their "tells.") It's all about the bluff "Poker is playing the player," Bob Breveglieri said when I talked strategy with this lifetime card player. "It's really a game of knowing who you're playing with." And how much you play the player depends on what kind of game you're in a limit or a no-limit. "In a Hold 'Em game that's a no-limit game, you can play the player," Breveglieri said. "In a $2 [limit] game, you have to play the cards." And, in a $2 limit game it's a lot harder to bluff someone out, Breveglieri said. Everyone stays, because the risk is so small. "On a $2 game if I had four cards to a flush, I'd stay in because I might get a flush on the River card," he said."In a no-limit game you probably wouldn't put $50,000 on a raise because the odds are greater that you wouldn't win the pot." Unless, he said, you're playing in one of the TV tournaments. Breveglieri is an avid viewer of the World Poker Tour, taping the Wednesday night broadcasts and reviewing them for strategy tips. He calls them "the biggest bluff game you've ever seen." And when it comes to the art of bluffing, Williamson, who has played in several local Texas Hold 'Em tournaments, said that he feels women have the edge. "A woman who knows the game is a better player because [she's] more difficult to read, her bluffs are harder to tell, " he said. "Many people feel women are better player," Bluff publisher Eddie Kleid concurred. He cited world-class players Annie Duke and Jennifer Armond as examples. "[But] in poker, just as in anything else, it's not the gender, it's the skill," he added. And it keeps you sharp "If you think about what's involved in playing poker it involves memory, it involves percentages, it involves social interaction among people and it usually involves the benefit of winning money," Paul Raia, director of patient care and patient support for the Massachusetts branch of the Alzheimer's Association told PRIME during an interview about the mental benefits of poker. "If you have two aces on the table, what's the percentage that someone else has another ace ... all these mental calculations reinforce mental pathways," Rain said. "And, there's some evidence that suggests that this not only supports the existing pathways, but creates new pathways or connections between brain cells." These new pathways, Raia explained, can help a person maintain more of their mental capacity should early Alzheimer's disease begin to affect some of the connections between brain cells. "If there are other connections that let people get around the impaired section of [their] brain, they can still function," Raia said. "Someone who doesn't play poker may not realize that it really is more of a strategy game than people think, Bluff co-publisher Eddie Kleid pointed out. "The key to being good is being able to adjust your strategy based on who you're playing." And those kinds of mental gymnastics, Raia said, are what make this game useful not only in helping early Alzheimer's patients to stave off the effects of the disease, but in protecting the rest of us from the memory-robbing disease. "[Poker] is also good for people who are younger meaning in their 40s who don't have a relative with Alzheimer's but who are interested in lowering their risk factors for the disease." Anybody for a little play?