A little over nine years ago, on Feb. 5, 2010, I played an online poker tournament from my couch, deep into the night, ultimately winning about 4 a.m. I’m sure of the date, because five hours later I gave birth to a daughter, my first child.
By the time our first son was born almost exactly three years later, online poker had ended. It wasn’t just the Internet version; I also no longer knew of dozens of regular home games. Many of my favorite Atlantic City casinos had closed their poker rooms. Poker was no longer all over my television.
The poker moment had abruptly ended, and it didn’t feel like a natural death.
Poker had long been part of the American mainstream but never more so than in the last 20 years.
The 1998 film “Rounders” considered a fair, if slightly absurd, portrayal of the illegal poker underworld in New York City, helping define the game and the way those who played it saw themselves compared to other gamblers out on the casino floor. Arguing with his girlfriend about whether poker is just a game of chance, the main character, Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon, rants: “Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas? It’s a skill game, Jo.”
And in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, it really was those same guys winning again and again. World Series of Poker Main Event winners Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, and Stu Ungar were legends in their world. Of course, back then, that world wasn’t all that big, nor were the fields they played against.
Poker’s boom can be traced back to the 2003 WSOP Main Event and Chris Moneymaker. Moneymaker, an accountant with the ideal, real-life surname for a poker champion, was the perfect symbol for the poker heyday. He qualified for the $10,000 buy-in event by playing and winning an $86 tournament on the online poker site PokerStars. His $2.5 million Main Event win, along with the coveted WSOP bracelet, was a signal to every regular Joe Shmoe watching from home: This could be you.
For a while, poker was everywhere. It was hard to turn on the TV and not catch a game. NBC featured both the cash game “Poker After Dark” and the “National Heads-Up Poker Championship.” Even Bravo had “Celebrity Poker Showdown.”
A 2004 ESPN corporate announcement called poker that year’s “ratings phenomenon.” The same corporate announcement just three years later ceased to mention poker at all.
The WSOP Main Event, the biggest tournament in the game, continues to attract large fields. But elsewhere poker has faded. So, what happened?
The government, basically.
In 2006, Bill Frist, then a Republican senator from Tennessee, hamstrung the game by sticking a provision in an unrelated port security bill that made it illegal to process transactions by online gaming sites. That should have been the death knell, but poker was so popular that many people found a way around the rules. There were third party offshore services that allowed players to cash in and cash out of online gaming sites.
You had to be committed, of course, which led to only the best players finding a way around the rules. The number of players steadily decreased, and the games themselves became far harder. It was the equivalent of wandering into a casino and sitting down with professionals.
Still, online poker persevered until April 15, 2011, a day referred to in the poker world as “Black Friday,” when the federal government moved to shut down the three biggest poker sites operating in the U.S.
It’s not a secret that casinos were largely involved in pressing the government to go after online poker. The irony is that, for casinos, poker is not even a moneymaker.
A 2014 article in Poker News, by Peter Chi, a statistics professor at California Polytechnic State University, noted, “At many Las Vegas casinos, their poker room may not actually be profitable in and of itself, even with the uptick during the WSOP months.” Instead, casinos, in Las Vegas or otherwise, make “the vast majority of their revenue through their slot machines and table games,” generally more than “everything else combined.”
In the last few years, though, casinos have realized they can get involved in the action. Caesars and MGM have launched their own online gaming sites in states where they are legal, while others, most notably Sheldon Adelson, who owns the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, continue to staunchly oppose that game.
Poker existed before the Internet and will continue to exist through the assaults on online play. But, for a moment, it was something bigger, a phenomenon uniting bros in basements with about-to-be-moms and everyone in between.
Karol Markowicz is a writer in New York City.
