ALL IN: My Love Affair With The World Poker Tour

Too much drinking plus an illegal cable connection got me hooked on The World Poker Tour. The year was 2002 and I was living in a squalid yet wonderful bachelor apartment on top of a fabric store on Toronto’s Queen Street West. When I first moved in, the cable was hooked up and that’s how it stayed, even though I never paid a dime. I would sit and drink and flip through hundreds of channels and that’s how I discovered The World Poker Tour. The WPT premiered that year and I dug it right away. I chuckled at the cornball antics of the announcers Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patton, I smiled at the Caribbean tournaments that seemed designed to put host Shana Hiatt into a bikini and most of all I loved the drama of watching the best poker players in the world compete for big, big bucks.

There is a dazzling rainbow of poker varieties but on the World Poker Tour there is only one game: No Limit Texas Hold ‘em. Each player is dealt two cards. Then three communal cards are dealt face up (“the flop”). Then another face-up card (“the turn”) and finally, the final face-up card (“the river.”) There is a round of betting after each deal. The players make their best five-card poker hand using any combination of the two cards in their hand and the five communal cards on the table.

The origins of Texas Hold ‘em are lost in the cigar haze of a thousand dingy back rooms. Robstown, Texas has been crowned the birthplace of the game but nobody knows for sure. Legendary Texan players like Doyle Brunson and Crandell Addington brought the game to Vegas in the late 1960s. No Limit Texas Hold ‘em became the main event at The World Series of Poker in 1971 and the game grew from there. In the first ten years of the World Series of Poker, Texans won the main event 7 out of 10 times. It makes sense that in the early days, Texans would have an advantage playing Texas Hold ‘em. I, too, am Texan, born n’ raised.

My dad is from Oklahoma. He learned poker from his grandmother. He used his skills to hustle his high school classmates, playing for quarters on the back of the school bus on band trips. His parents, my paternal grandparents, were such big card players that they were nicknamed “Ace” and “Queenie.” My great-grandmother and my grandfather on my mother’s side played poker as well. I have their old poker chips inside a “chip caddy” inside a cardboard box that’s older than I am.

Even with the Texas connection and the family background, I rarely played poker growing up. I didn’t play in high school, didn’t play in University. In the circles I ran in, poker just wasn’t a thing. Then, a few years after I graduated, The World Poker Tour swept the Earth. The Poker Boom had begun.

Soon I was playing in two regular home games. The buy-ins were low ($20, $40): a fair price for a fun night out but large enough to be worth your while if you won. Sometimes we played Winner Take All (a “freeze-out”) and other times we divvied up the prize pool into 1^st place, 2^nd and 3^rd. Home games were as far as I went. Online poker wasn’t a thing yet. I never ventured into any of Toronto’s many underground card clubs and I never played poker in a casino. (My buddy and I did win a couple hundred bucks playing blackjack while tripping balls at Casino Niagara but that’s a different story.)

I wasn’t the best player at the table and I wasn’t the worst. I often came in third and was happy to get my buy-in back plus a couple extra bucks: enough for some beer or art supplies or on some magical evenings, both. The best night I ever had at the table was a night when I was experiencing a hypomanic episode. I was like a whole different person. I couldn’t stop talking, twitching, laughing. I was betting much more aggressively than my normal style of play, splashing my money all over the place. The other players didn’t know what to do. One of them even stared at me and asked, “Who ARE you?” That night I didn’t win but after a massive all-in bet I came in second for some pretty decent cash.

After that night, my game plateaued. And when I realized I wasn’t getting any better, my interest in the game faded. Around this time the World Poker Tour switched formats: instead of one final table per hour-long episode, now each final table was stretched over three hour-long episodes. I hated the new format. Having to wait three weeks to find out who won a game really killed the drama and suspense. I stopped watching. Life went on.

Fast forward to 2021. It’s the second year of the Covid pandemic (depending on when you start counting). I’m searching the streaming services for some good old fashioned comfort viewing. And then on Tubi, I see it: The World Poker Tour.  The episodes on Tubi pretty much picked up right where I left off. Watching it was like settling into a nice warm bath. There was Mike Sexton, seemingly a kindly mid-Western Grandfather type (in fact, a legendary gambler and a member of The Poker Hall of Fame, now sadly deceased) and the interplay between him and Vince Van Patten (Dick Van Patten’s son) was as corny as ever. Shana Hiatt was gone and so was her bikini but in her place was Kimberly Lansing and then Lynn Gilmartin, who still has the hosting gig. I settled in to binge these broadcasts from a simpler pre-Covid world.

Since I started watching, I’ve gotten interested in poker again. I’ve read three poker autobiographies and one poker biography. My seven year old loves games of all kinds (he can beat me at chess!) so I taught him poker. We don’t play for money; we play for chips with imaginary dollar values. Once he beat me for seven hundred trillion dollars. It’s hard to come back from a loss like that.

The World Poker Tour is a slice of Americana that really warms my soul. Mike Sexton reminds me of my own kindly Midwestern Grandfather, Grampa Jim, also now sadly deceased. The WPT is corny, cheesy, maybe even more than a little sexist (Shana Hiatt’s bikini has been replaced by The Royal Flush Girls, who smile and stand next to things Vanna White style). But I still love it, especially now, as it reminds me of simpler times.

No one knows what the future holds, but it’s my hope that when my son is older, he won’t remember the darkness and anxiety of these Covid years. I hope when he looks back, he remembers playing games in the summer with his Dad, which I will continue to do, for as long as he wants and as long as I am able.