His worst-case scenario was to buy airtime himself, but he did not have enough capital; to raise it, he'd have to further dilute his ownership. So, finished episodes in hand, he kept trying to woo a network partner. From the beginning, Lipscomb had believed that to build a loyal audience, he needed a regularly scheduled time, like Monday Night Football. Among the many cable networks he eventually approached was, of all places, the Travel Channel. Somewhat to his surprise, the network bought an entire season, and as the slogan now declares, "Wednesday Is Poker Night on the Travel Channel."
The WPT attracts three million to five million viewers a week, often out-drawing the PGA and the NBA.
The first show aired in March 2003. Remarkably, its audience doubled over the course of its two-hour time slot, a trend that continued for the first five episodes. In television ratings, a single Nielsen point represents 1% of the nation's television households, or between 1 million and 1.1 million viewers. As Lipscomb recalls, the first show started with a rating of .42 and by the end of its two hours had grown to .85, for an aggregate of .6 or .7. By the end of the first season, the show had grown to an aggregate of 1. Even more impressive, when the show went into reruns, the ratings actually went up. "A third better," says Lipscomb. "I don't know of anything that's ever done that." Plus, it was a two-hour show, which is a long time to maintain those ratings. Today the WPT attracts three million to five million viewers a week, often outdrawing PGA golf and NBA basketball -- both on major networks.
The networks eventually noticed what Lipscomb was creating. On Super Bowl Sunday in January 2004, NBC, in cooperation with the Travel Channel, gave the WPT a network audience opposite the much-hyped pregame show -- and more than five million people tuned in.
Success, of course, brings new problems. The WPT was a hit, and it quickly spawned competitors, including Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo, Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament on Fox Sports, Poker Royale on Game Show Network, Hollywood Card Night in the works at E! Entertainment Television, and revamped coverage of the World Series of Poker on ESPN.
Most unsettling to the WPT crew is that the other shows use visual formats similar to the one Lipscomb developed. His is currently patent pending. "If the greatest form of flattery is imitation," says Lipscomb, "then we have been overflattered." Still, he accepts the situation, and his experience as a lawyer has left him inclined to consider legal action only as a last resort. "When a television show creates a new phenomenon," says Lipscomb, "others will imitate it, like reality TV. Everything from our hole-card cam to our graphics has been copied. But we are the Survivor of this genre.
"The real question is, Do we have an advantage over the competitors that are coming after us? Anyone who wants to take on the WPT has to take on not just the WPT and the Travel Channel, but also the resources of the Bellagio, Foxwoods, Borgata, Commerce, and the Bicycle Casino. We make the best television. The future is for us to continue to make the WPT events into the Wimbledons and the U.S. Opens of poker."
Lipscomb's plan has always been to do more than build a hit show. "The New York Times said that 50 million people were playing poker on a regular basis, and no one had branded it," he says. "This became our mission."
The next phase was merchandising, starting with chips, tables, and playing cards, what Lipscomb calls "the lowest-hanging fruit." For months prior to this past Christmas, U.S. Playing Cards was unable to make its fancy WPT chip sets fast enough to meet demand. "We are just getting started," says Kania. "We'll have 40 to 50 licensees" -- boxed DVD sets, clothing, more -- "by the end of 2005." The company just signed a multivolume book deal with HarperCollins; Mike Sexton, the show's co-host and expert commentator, wrote the first volume, released in March. Also on the way is a wireless platform that lets you play WPT poker on your cell phone. Lakes Entertainment has developed a casino table game version of WPT All-In Hold 'em Poker, to be rolled out alongside roulette and blackjack tables nationwide. Casinos wishing to deploy the game will pay fees to Lakes and Lakes will pay a fee to the WPT. The WPT brand has even been extended to scratch-off state lottery tickets in seven states.
And yet, the WPT's greatest opportunity may lie on the Internet. Internet poker has been red-hot -- even though running a U.S.-based gambling site is illegal. One leading site, PartyPoker.com, gets more than 100,000 players a day. In December, Lipscomb finalized a deal with WagerWorks to create a site that will be operated abroad and can be accessed only from outside the U.S. WPTonline.com, which will allow live poker play from legal markets, is expected to launch by summer. "It is my expectation that this will be bigger, financially, than anything else they have done," says Dennis Nielsen, an analyst for Minneapolis-based Feltl and Co., the investment banking firm that took WPT public last year.
It will also continue the global expansion. A dramatic side effect of Lipscomb's conceiving the show as if the volume were off is that people who don't speak English can follow it. By the end of 2004, the WPT had foreign distribution deals in 57 countries. "You do not even have to understand poker to enjoy it," says co-host Mike Sexton. "When someone pushes all his chips into the pot, says 'All in,' and stands up, everyone understands. That's the magic and the drama. It's the ultimate in reality TV: real people playing real poker for real money."
In the second season's "Party Poker Million" episode, for example, construction worker Chris Hinchcliffe, who qualified for the $10,000 entry by winning an online tournament with a $35 entry fee, came to the final table as the Cinderella story. He held an immense chip lead, nearly three times as much as the second-place player, despite facing four of the world's top pros. He stood to take home a cool million in his first big tournament. Instead, he made mistake after mistake -- playing bad hands too aggressively -- but still finished a respectable third. "The whole key to the poker craze," says Lipscomb, "is that you are watching ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Not only are you seeing a construction worker playing poker for a million dollars, but he's doing it against the very best. It's David versus Goliath." Sometimes, of course, Goliath wins.
