Jackpot!

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.

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.

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