jsp said:
Hire the geniuses that produced the World Poker Tour (on the Travel Channel) and produce a higher-quality TV program that would attract a much broader audience.
Again, it's all about TV. Unless people watch the darn thing on TV, the tour will never make the money to sustain itself.
You're talking about Steve Lipscomb,
here is a detailed article of how he made poker popular.
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How Poker Became Popular - Part 1
Before Steve Lipscomb launched the World Poker Tour, poker had a vaguely seedy rep. Now it's a national obsession, and the WPT is a public company with a market cap of $300 million. How Lipscomb built his empire -- without risking a cent.
Layne Flack needs a six. His opponent has just called Flack's raise, placing Flack's entire stack of chips, several hundred thousand dollars' worth, in jeopardy. This is happening in the World Poker Tour's "arena," an elevated table surrounded by flashing lights, multiple cameras, and hundreds of wide-eyed fans. The last two cards are about to be dealt.
Backstage, Steve Lipscomb is barking instructions into a headset while pacing and gesturing wildly in front of a bank of television monitors. Each monitor corresponds to a different camera, with the name of its operator on a piece of masking tape above the screen, and Lipscomb shouts nonstop: "Mike! Zoom in on the chips. Dave, good work, now pan left. Chuck, let's get the audience. I need some suspense."
For an average-looking guy of average size, Lipscomb has a big personality. As always, he's dressed in a casual two-piece suit and open-collared shirt. He openly roots for players during big hands, favoring not one over the other but the more dramatic outcome over the more mundane. This approach has helped him create one of the highest rated shows in the history of cable. He never sits, stopping his shifting and gesturing only long enough to drink a soda. He even directs the audience, relaying instructions to staffers within the arena, who in turn cue the fans when to gasp, clap, or look shocked -- using expressions Lipscomb himself rehearsed with them before the final table began. The only thing he doesn't do is answer his cell phone, which rings constantly.
Back at the table, the cards are dealt, and Flack gets his six. He cannot contain a smile. His opponent shakes hands graciously but is clearly seething, having done everything right and lost because of very bad luck. Flack will go on to win the tournament -- a fact that will be widely noted in bars and chatrooms and around water coolers. Overnight, "I'm all in!" has become a catch phrase. By some estimates, more than 50 million Americans are into poker, and Lipscomb -- founder and president of the World Poker Tour -- has made it his mission to build the game's premier brand. In three short years he has taken poker from smoky backrooms to the Nasdaq and prime-time television, with ratings that regularly top network coverage of the NBA and PGA.
Now 43, Steve Lipscomb was a lawyer by trade and an entrepreneur at heart, which led to his first business, an attorney-referral service. But relatively late in life, he changed course. The change came after Lipscomb, who grew up in Knoxville, Tenn., and came from a long line of Baptist ministers, watched his deeply religious mother continue the family tradition by entering the seminary -- only to encounter sex discrimination that she felt stopped her rise through the hierarchy of the Southern Baptist Church. Believing the world needed to know, an angry Lipscomb decided to make a documentary film.
He sold his business, taught himself the basics of filmmaking, and dove in. The result, Battle for the Minds, documented the rise of fundamentalism within the church and went on to win critical acclaim and numerous awards. It was selected to be one of 10 films shown on PBS's Point of View, which brought Lipscomb to the attention of producer Norman Lear. Lipscomb began making shows with Lear, which is how he found himself filming an inside look at the World Series of Poker, the sport's marquee annual event -- one with which he was personally familiar. He had once entered a $100 satellite tournament just for fun and won a $10,000 seat at the main event. "I never expected to win," he says. "I called my wife, who was pregnant with our first child, and told her I'd had fun and didn't care if I didn't play the rest of the tournament, which would have taken several more days. Then I told her first prize was a million dollars and she said I could stay."
When Lipscomb first saw televised poker, it was being shown by ESPN: "Worse than watching paint dry," he says. He didn't win, but poker was now in his blood. And what he saw filming the World Series of Poker changed his life. He saw firsthand the culture, the characters, and the fans. He also concluded that ESPN, which aired the WSOP, was doing a terrible job. "Worse than watching paint dry," he recalls.
Lipscomb knew he could make poker more exciting to watch, but he also had a more ambitious vision: to create a league akin to the major professional sports, one that would lead to merchandising, foreign licensing, Internet competition, and spinoffs. As he now says, "I view us today as a Microsoft, not an IBM," meaning that he developed the show not as a product but as a platform.
First, he needed collaborators. He signed on two friends, Robyn Moder, who had overseen production on America's Most Wanted and Cops, and Audrey Kania, who had launched new divisions for Disney's Consumer Products Group. Selling licensed merchandise was a big part of his WPT plan, and Lipscomb knew that few were better at it than Mickey and company.
As he proceeded, Lipscomb followed the model of golf's PGA Tour. In golf, there are no teams or owners, just individual players who enter tournaments as they see fit and pay their own way. The prizes they compete for come mainly from sponsors, not the league itself. International events and players move in and out of the mix, and satellite tournaments have been developed in every corner of the globe.
"I created the only sports league in America where you can come out and play." But Lipscomb set out to offer something even the PGA couldn't match: "I created the only sports league in America where you can come out and play. If you could sell spots for people to suit up and play in the NBA finals for, say, $25,000, lots of people would do it. But you can't. Here, you can pay your money and compete with the best players in the world. And you can win." Anyone with $10,000 or so can buy into a World Poker Tour event, and hundreds of people have been doing just that. Lipscomb's WPT has the largest prize pool -- $70 million to $90 million, this year -- of any sports league in North America and regularly creates one or two millionaires a month.
Early on, few shared the vision. From his television production days, Lipscomb knew executives at many networks and cable stations, but when he called, they laughed. Given the limited success of televised poker to that point, no one else thought the airwaves needed even more poker. Its seedy backroom image made it difficult to interest television, potential employees, sponsors, and later, investment bankers. Some potential hires visiting the firm's temporary office in Los Angeles wondered if the enterprise was closer to porn than to mainstream entertainment.
But Lipscomb was convinced that, as with Battle for the Minds, he just needed to show people his product. He decided to raise enough money to produce the show before it had been sold to television. His first call was to Lyle Berman, founder of Lakes Entertainment, a company that consults with Native American tribes in developing casino gaming. An avid poker player, Berman was one of many subjects Lipscomb had met while making his poker documentary. Berman got it right away. The Lakes Entertainment board approved a $3.5 million investment in December 2001, and the World Poker Tour was in business the following February, just five months after Lipscomb started writing his business plan. He sold 70% of his concept to Lakes, kept 16.5% for himself, and divvied up the rest to top management and others. To get the WPT off the ground, he gave up a lot, but he put in no money himself. "I'm a sweat equity guy," he says.
Lipscomb, Kania, Moder, and an assistant moved into four offices on a former Warner Brothers production lot in West Hollywood. The historic building had been converted to offices and was chosen for its flexible floor plan, which allowed tenants to expand as needed. In three years, the WPT has hired 57 full-time employees and now occupies almost the entire building. It has working sound stages -- and, says Kania, "celebrities playing basketball just outside."
The first thing Lipscomb did after securing his venture capital was to hit the road and persuade high-profile casinos to get involved. The events that are now part of the WPT already existed, as discrete tournaments, waiting to be pulled together under an umbrella. In the world of big-time tournament poker, the majors have long been the $10,000-entry No Limit Texas Hold 'em tournaments. One such event was the World Poker Finals at Foxwoods in Connecticut.
When Lipscomb and Kania showed up at Foxwoods in March 2002 to make their pitch, they were shocked to find the casino executives, from the boss through middle management, in suits and ties, seated around a huge conference table. "All we had brought was a flip chart," Lipscomb recalls. The audience seemed unreceptive to the pitch, but less than 20 minutes after Lipscomb finished, his cell phone rang. It was the casino's poker-room manager, Kathy Raymond, calling to sign on. Lipscomb says Kania still kids him about how big his smile grew as he took the call. They had a deal, and now Lipscomb had the leverage to get other venues -- the Bellagio, Commerce -- on board. "I signed them up within a month," he says, "and by the beginning of April, we had a tour."
The first WPT event, the Five Diamond Poker Classic, was scheduled for the Bellagio in June 2002 and several others followed quickly. The events, from the prize pools to the administration to the tables, chips, and dealers, are run (and paid for) by the casinos -- all, that is, except for the final table, when the last six contestants are seated in the WPT's "arena." Thus, despite purses as high as $7 million each week, the events are put on with little expense for Lipscomb and the WPT.
But Lipscomb did have to assemble the crew, staff, and infrastructure to start filming. He hired Mike Sexton, a poker pro, and Vince Van Patten, the former child actor and professional tennis player, to be on-air hosts. Shana Hiatt, a former host of E! Entertainment's Wild On adventure show, would be the roving reporter. Things were so frantic leading up to the first Foxwoods event that Lipscomb designed the WPT arena -- a stage featuring the final table and announcers' booth, surrounded by swirling spotlights, cameras, and banners, all mounted on metal scaffolding -- on the back of a napkin. He and his crew created the set, developed the show's structure, and brainstormed the innovation that changed everything about televised poker: the now-famous "hole cams," miniature cameras that allow the television audience to see the players' concealed cards. In Hold 'em, each player gets two cards dealt face-down, and then all the players share five common cards dealt face-up. By showing the down -- or "hole" -- cards to the fans, Lipscomb lets the audience see who's bluffing, who has a monster hand, and how the pros play.
After months of filming, Lipscomb had a lot of promising raw footage but no one interested in airing the show. "It took me eight months to edit the footage for the first two-hour show," he says. "That was me sitting down with an editor, six days a week, for 15- to 18-hour days. About three months into it, people from Lakes Entertainment were calling, saying, 'When are we going to see something?' I thought maybe we just couldn't do it. All the ways we tried to put it together and put it on the screen had not worked. There was so much information to get across."
It took three and a half months of searching for a format before Lipscomb had his "aha!" moment: Imagining a sports bar, he suddenly realized that all popular televised sports can be enjoyed with the sound off. He decided to use graphics to make poker watchable. To do this, he created an onscreen format that displays icons of the cards, along with the players' names and amounts bet and constantly recomputed odds of winning. He finished editing the show, and his investors and partners loved it. But the WPT still had no TV deal.
