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Get Four
|  | MARCH 10, 2005
By Ronald Grover and Diane Brady Kings, Queens, and Jokers TV poker comes in all formats, from celebrity joke fests to edge-of-the-seat tension as the pros ante and bluff for the biggest pots It's 300 miles and acres of ambience from the glitter of the Las Vegas Strip. But at the Commerce Casino, a truck-stop card club on a highway running west of Los Angeles, the stars are out. Trailed by their publicist, poker pros Joe "The Elegance" Beevers, "Rocky" Ross Boatman and his brother Barny, and Ram "Crazy Horse" Vaswani roam the near-empty pits, attracting stares from off-duty cabbies and five-card studs hunched over the tables. "I saw you on television," a dealer says excitedly to Beevers. They are the Hendon Mob, four Brits with flashy suits, fancy cars, and outsize personalities who are on their way to becoming the promotional champions of the poker world. Prima Poker, a collection of 30 online poker sites, is staking them $1.25 million a year to enter tournaments around the world and publicize Prima (see BW Online, 3/10/05, "TV Poker's Rising Stakes"). OFFSHORE OUTFITS. "We're like goodwill ambassadors," says Boatman, a British soap-opera star before hooking up with his fellow Mob members over a game in Beevers' London flat. Onetime snooker pro Vaswani, known for his aggressive play, was ranked No. 41 in the world last year, with $689,000 in winnings, and the Mob's résumé includes a collection of European poker championships. These days, poker is a pastime getting crowded with card-shuffling ambassadors. A growing number of the Web's 200-odd sites, running games from locales like the Isle of Man and Aruba, are signing poker pros to hawk online tournaments, conduct seminars, and engage in chats with players. Nine-time world champ Phil Hellmuth, who promotes Antigua-based site UltimateBet.com, was decked out in shirt and hat carrying the site's logo on Mar. 8, when he won $500,000 on NBC's Head's Up Tournament at the Golden Nugget. Indeed, backroom hustlers are becoming cable-TV stars thanks to ESPN (DIS ), Travel Channel, Bravo (GE ), and other channels that carry poker tournaments. "The Prima deal opened a lot of our eyes that we've become celebrities," says Clonie Gowen, a former Miss Teen Oklahoma who won a 2003 tournament in Costa Rica and now endorses FullTiltPoker.com. "Tiger [Woods] does it with Nike (NKE ), only we don't get as much." NOT EVERYONE PLAYS. When one of the stars is on a site, traffic jumps, points out Prima Poker Chief Operating Officer John Dougherty, who says 1,000 folks may sign on just to watch Vaswani play. Overall, he says, traffic has jumped fivefold, to 25,000 a day, in the last year for the 30 Prima sites. Still, promoting poker on the tube isn't a laydown winner. Many corporations refuse to sponsor TV tournaments, and most cable channels won't allow players to be shown wearing shirts with the logos of poker sites, fearing that they'll run afoul of Justice Dept. guidelines against promoting illegal gambling. Still, some sites get around that problem: FullTilt uses logos that promote its instructional site, not the poker-playing site, says Bob Wolf, a marketing consultant to FullTilt. When Hellmuth won the $500,000 on NBC, the logos on his shirt and hat dropped the .com designation. And as poker's streak stays hot, the pros are reveling in their celebrity. Soon, the Hendon Mob will even have its own show on a poker channel in Britain. Sounds as though they've delt themselves a pretty nice hand. Poker is plastered all over TV these days. A sample of the offerings: Bravo -- Celebrity Poker Showdown. With players like Ray Romano, Catherine O'Hara, and Jason Alexander, don't expect a lot of poker faces as five celebs compete for a piece of a $250,000 prize pool. Even one of the hosts is a comedian -- David Foley of cult favorite The Kids in the Hall. "People get to see a different side of these celebrities," says Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick. "There's something incredible about seeing them take on the art of the bluff." More entertaining than educational, and even losers get some cash for their favorite charities. ESPN -- World Series of Poker. Trust ESPN to get the original, and what's widely considered the most famous, poker tournament in the world. With a more limited schedule and a roster of true veterans of the game, this one is for serious poker fans. But ESPN is expanding its tournament coverage this year and gets a celebrity dose with TILT, a series about three professional gamblers that stars Michael Madsen and centers -- you guessed it -- on the intrigue around a fictional world poker championship. Fox Sports Network -- Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament. The second season starts Mar. 13, featuring 24 professional champs such as Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, and Carlos Mortensen vying for $1.5 million in prizes. "With only the top players, people get the highest caliber game in the world," asserts George Greenberg, executive vice-president for programming and production, who boasts, "our commentators are less glib and more incisive" than some rivals. These guys aren't in it for laughs or celebrity sightings. But neither are their fans. GSN -- Poker Royale: Battle of the Sexes. -- What's a sporting event without a little sexual tension? The girls-vs.-guys theme for the second season of Poker Royale featured name-calling, sarcasm, and running commentary from bellicose radio personality Tom Leykis. The girls won the Mar. 4 finale, and GSN -- formerly Game Show Network -- is gearing up for more ways to slice the deck. "Regular tournament poker looks ugly," says Ian Valentine, senior programming vice-president. "I see our poker as more entertainment than sport." Travel Channel -- World Poker Tour. Now in its third season, WPT uses innovative camera work, funky graphics, a pretty hostess, humorous commentators, and player clips to build drama into the game. It all has the feel of a reality show, with occasional minor celebrities like 1970s TV star Gabe Kaplan (Welcome Back, Kotter) known to show up -- and do well! The payoff for the 1 million-plus viewers, "every week, at the end of the show, there's a big-time winner," says Daniel Russell, vice-president for programming And he credits WPT with elevating the game. "This isn't dark, shady, backroom poker," he says.  Grover is BusinessWeek's Los Angeles bureau chief, and Brady is a senior writer in New York
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