It?s a Hold?em World Part I
When it comes to card games, Hold’em is king. I apologize to all of you Go-Fish sharks and master pineapplers, but when it comes down to gross games and money played, it is not even close — Texas Hold’em reigns supreme.
While the global numbers are nigh impossible to get at, Party Poker, one of the three major online poker sites, reports numbers like these: of the 8,619 cash game players online as of 1:00pm MST, January 21, 2008, 8,196 were playing Hold’em, with 6,454 participating in a No Limit game. More than 20,000 cash game players will log on and move money on Party Poker on the average Monday, with nearly 95% of them doing it in Hold’em rooms.
Why? Why does Hold’em so dominate the world of poker? The following two part series will explore both the history of Texas Hold’em and poker as a whole as well as the qualities of the game itself which have contributed to its meteoric rise.
As far as the history books are concerned, poker as we know it began sometime in the 1820s in New Orleans. Some sailors began to bet on who they thought possessed the best three card hand dealt from a deck of somewhere between 20 and 32 cards. There were no suits on the cards, and in their minds there was no such thing as a straight.
Then poker took to the river. Fueled mainly by the Mississippi River Boat, by 1850 poker had grown into a national game, the 52 card English deck had been introduced and the term “river boat gambler” had been coined. During the course of the American Civil War, the flush, the straight, the five card hand, stud and draw poker were all integrated into the way the games were played. As far as we can tell today, the most popular games of the pre-1900 period were a French cousin of poker called faro – kind of a cross between baccarat and craps – and five-card draw. Some of the early five-card draw champs remain notorious even today, most notably Wild Bill Hickok. Recently, Ole’ Bill was at the center of the first season of HBO’s acclaimed “Deadwood” series, where he once again met his demise at the poker table, famously holding two pair, Aces and Eights, forever known as “The Dead Man’s Hand.”
Then the joker came in 1875, lo-ball around 1900, and in 1925 Texas Hold’em was officially recognized by Dallas, Texas when community cards were introduced. In actuality, Texas Hold’em was born around a decade earlier in Robstown, Texas, a town of about 13,000 people that still stands today.
Not much is known about Poker history between 1920 and 1955, probably because it was considered a dirty form of entertainment and was marginalized by mainstream media. Then in 1955, a strapping young man courted by the Minneapolis Lakers who shattered his whole leg at once and would go on to change the face of poker forever.
Doyle Brunson was born in Texas in 1933 and had plans to be a basketball player until he broke his leg in 1954 performing some manual labor, an injury for which he still needs a crutch. Over the next 13 years, Doyle would travel the country playing in largely illegal games with his friends Amarillo Slim and Sailor Roberts until 1967, when Doyle Brunson came to Las Vegas.
Until 1967, Hold’em did not exist in Las Vegas. Brunson, a Texas boy who’d been playing Hold’em for fifteen years by 1967, first brought the game to the Golden Nugget Casino. Despite his growing reputation as a high-stakes gambler, Hold’em was relatively obscure in Vegas, so Doyle and friends mostly played stud. Only occasionally could they find enough interested strangers to get a Hold’em game going. But Doyle loved his home state’s game, and was confident that it would grow.
The first big turn came in 1969 when the Gambling Fraternity Convention, which would be renamed the World Series of Poker the following year, began playing Texas Hold’em for a number of its tournaments. In 1972, the now World Series of Poker Main Event became No Limit Texas Hold’em, and the growth has been exponential ever since. The first main event was a table of 8 players, where the winner was voted on by the players – now the tournament is regularly above 6,000 entrants.
The next major step up for Hold’em occurred again through Doyle Brunson: as Texas Dolly published a series of books, from Super/System to “How I made One Million Dollars Playing Poker” Doyle was legitimizing both the card player career and Texas Hold’em the game. By 1982, 104 players were buying into the main event. The figure grew consistently by 15-50 entrants each year until 1998, when the movie “Rounders” was released. The following year saw the field grow by 119 entrants to 512 total players.
By 2003, that number had grown to 839, an already impressive number more than 100 times the original field. Players like Phil Hellmuth and other so-called Hold’em specialists or gamblers who only played Texas Hold’em had risen up to claim international fame. It seemed as if the WSOP Main Event was on pace to hit 1,000 entrants in the next 5 years, a staggering number considering the ,000 price tag that came with a seat in the tournament – then came the NHL strike.
Outside of anything Doyle Brunson did, the NHL strike was the single most important event in the history of Hold’em. With the NHL on strike, ESPN2 had a huge slate of programming that needed to be filled. Enter Chris Moneymaker.
Moneymaker gained entry to the Main-Event through a satellite tournament as he had nowhere near enough money to his oh-so- appropriate name to pony up the ,000. 3 days, 1 unbelievable call on a Dutch Boyd bluff and a big bluff of his own on runner up Sammy Farha later, Chris Moneymaker had won .5 million and the coveted Main-Event bracelet. Much to the surprise of the ESPN network, when the numbers finally came in, the Nielson ratings for the 2003 WSOP had been higher than the previous year’s NHL showings. With that, No Limit Texas Hold’em became a nationwide craze.
Chris Moneymaker became the poster boy for the rags-to-riches, anyone-can-do-it poker star; the following year, a mind boggling 2,576 people paid the buy-in, only to be dwarfed by the following year’s 5,619 and 2006’s small city of 8,773.
More than just an explosion of WSOP entrants, there was an explosion of online gaming as well. In 1998, there was only one online gaming site, Planet Poker, played on regularly by less than 2,000 players per day. In 2000 and 2001, there was the rise and fall of Dutch Boyd’s infamous Poker Spot. It was not until Party Poker began its exhaustive television advertising campaign in 2003, capitalizing on Chris Moneymaker’s Cinderella story, that online gaming became the entity that it is today. With 20,000 players on a slow day, Party Poker and other major sites have become the largest arena for poker in the history of the world.
So why is Texas Hold’em so by far and away the poker game of choice? In part, because of the work of Doyle Brunson, in part because of the WSOP Main Event, online giants like Party Poker, even Chris Moneymaker and the NHL strike played a role. In part two of the series, we will investigate the inherent qualities of Texas Hold’em itself which have contributed to its rise.
This article was published courtesy of TightPoker.com.
Tight Poker (www.tightpoker.com) is the top site for Party Poker information and promos, as well as a popular resource center for Poker news, promotions, reviews of online poker sites, strategy articles and also home to an active forum for discussing poker news and strategy.
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