Why do we play poker? What is the point? The buzz is always the same: We play for the money! Over and over you hear and read about it. Money is what counts. Forget the fancy plays. Who cares about the elegant moves? Get the cash. Look for the best games. Move when the rocks sit down. Find the fish, the tourists with the fins and scales.

Well, sure, money is fine. And if you’re at the poker table to put bread on the dinner table you go where the money is. But this point of view, we suspect, is not all it’s cracked up to be. Let’s face it; precious few of the denizens of the poker rooms around the country are professionals. Most are recreational players. Many are also long term losers too. When the rake and the tokes are factored into the cost of doing business, a commonly cited figure is that only about 10 percent of regular poker players are long-term winners.

And you know what, that figure might even be too high. If you’re playing where the rake for a $10-$20 game is $5 per half hour and you tip a buck for each winning pot and each “free” coffee or bottle of water, you’ve got to be beating the game for something like $15 an hour just to break even!

So why is everyone there? Well, there are a lot reasons, and most of them are obvious. Friendship, the social setting, the love of the game, and the craving for action are all cited. To these we can add two more. One is the game’s intellectual challenge. The other is player ego!

The first is pretty obvious. You have to be on your mental toes all the time if you want to play poker successfully. Few things tickle the frontal lobes more than this kind of investment of cognitive energy. There are an awful lot of superannuated characters playing this game and keeping themselves mentally young because the game ¾ if you play it right ¾ just won’t let your brain die.

The second is bit trickier. So, here’s a short tale to use as an object lesson. This just happened to one of us recently. And please, no catcalls, boos, hisses and forget about passing over a towel to mop up any crocodile tears.

With only two free hours, one of us sat down in a $15-$30 7-Stud/8 game. Not his usual game, but he’d been reading up on it and had gotten interested in its complexity. In fact, he passed on his usual hold‘em game where the crew has been having him “for lunch” for the past two months. In fact, things had been going so bad over there that his bankroll had shrunk to the point where he didn’t even need a rubber band!

But our hero dove into the 7-stud/8 game with whatever enthusiasm he could muster. “Got two hours here,” he said to himself, “let’s see what happens.” Win a few; lose a few. An hour and a half goes by and he’s basically even. Not much was happening until he looks down at Jc-Kc in the hole and Js door card. Though he usually eschews hands like this, he got away with matching the bring-in and stuck around. Another K hit on fourth street. And he filled it on sixth street. The two lows bricked out and a lovely pot was won. This was just the beginning. The next 25 or so minutes were unreal. Every hand that had died a-borning over the last eight weeks got filled. Our hero hit a miracle card to fill a wheel, and then followed that exploit by catching the suited ace on the river to scoop with a baby flush. Then he took down a monster by hitting runner-runner for a small straight. Sheesh. This must be what they mean when they say, “I got run over by the deck.”

When the two hours expired, one of your authors cashed out on the plus side just a tad under $1.4 kilobucks ¾ and all of it won in just under a half hour. Nothing like a split game if you’re going to get hot. Your hero rolled into bed and fell asleep. Not the sleep of the just. Not the sleep of the righteous. Not even the sleep of the conqueror, just the sleep of the tired. The next day was oddly flat too. It didn’t make sense. He’d won that kind of money in the past playing at these levels and it always made his day, indeed, his week. But not this time.

It took until the next day before he realized why this magical session seemed so drab. He had absolutely nothing to do with it! He just sat there and picked up magic cards. In fact, after the third scooper he really didn’t even recall paying much attention to anyone else’s cards. It didn’t seem to matter what they had. They all would just “brick out” while our boy would catch any gut shot he might have needed and take down another pot. It was as if someone had said, “Hey buddy, want a bunch of money?”

“Sure, why not,” your author answered, “Money’s neat, I’ll take some.”

So if money is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of poker, what’s wrong with this picture? Here’s what’s wrong. Ego was missing! When this kind of cash is won, players want to go to bed knowing that it was good poker that won the money; that the right decisions were made, and skill won out. We want to feel like we made this money the old fashioned way, we earned it. But when the deck runs over you, you feel like a bystander, just sitting there watching cards. It can be distinctly weird.

Although more money is a lot nicer than less of it, we would rather win a measly three hundred bucks on a night where we got more than our share of “bricks” than have lady luck slip a dime and change in our pockets. In fact, we would rather lose a couple of hundred if we thought that the average slob would have gone broke with our cards. After all, if you can attribute your wins to skill, you know you figure to come out ahead in the long run. But if you have to rely on dame fortune for your care and feeding, it’s a distinctly insecure feeling, because the locus of control is far outside of your grasp.

Al Alvarez noted in his wonderful book The Biggest Game in Town that the chips are just there to keep score. The implication was that the real coin of this realm is psychological. That the size of your bankroll is really a measure of how good you are. When we first read this, we thought it a cute line, but we didn’t give Alvarez credit for his wisdom in capturing an essential piece of the spirit of poker. There is more insight here than we first realized. So, what do we really play this game for anyway?

It was the biggest top prize in the world’s most prestigious poker tournament that had attracted the largest field in the World Series championship’s storied 35-year history.

Just as dramatic as the showdown between the final survivors from a field of 2,576 entrants was who the top winners were. They were not crusty professional poker players who had worked their way up in the game beginning in some backroom poker game. They were a patent attorney from Connecticut and a college student from Texas. And they had both qualified for the World Series of Poker No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em championship through Internet competition.

Greg Raymer, a lawyer from Stonington, Conn., who finished first and won the $5 million, and David Williams, a junior economics major at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who earned $3.5 million for second, qualified for the high-stakes tournament on a Web site called PokerStars.com – one of many such Web sites – where computer users compete against players from all over the world.

More than a third of the players earned seats in the World Series championship field in online tournaments, according to a WSOP spokesman. The presence of so many online poker players – and their success – signaled a fundamental change in the poker landscape that was once dominated by colorful so-called rounders, like “Amarillo Slim” Preston and Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson.

In the last few years, Internet players have become dangerous wildcards in top tournaments, sometimes playing aggressively and erratically or with surprising skill and cunning. But in either case, they often bushwhack more seasoned professionals. “You can’t point at a guy any more and say he’s ‘dead money’,” said a top pro, Howard Lederer, using the poker term for someone believed to have no chance.

Texas Hold ‘em is a deceptively simple game. Each player is dealt two cards face down. Five more cards, dealt face up, are community cards. The community cards are exposed in a sequence of first three (called the flop), then one (the turn) and then the final card (the river). Betting occurs before and after each interval. Players form the best five-card poker hand using any combination of their own cards and the five community cards.

Often, players enter the World Series of Poker No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em finals by simply buying a seat; the cost is $10,000. But players can also qualify by winning preliminary events, called satellites, that they enter for lesser amounts. Not long ago, satellites were held exclusively in brick-and-mortar casinos and card rooms. More recently, though, poker Web sites have offered such tournaments. And the game’s popularity has soared.

Here’s an example:
Eighty-one players, each paying about $150 to a poker Web site, enter an Internet satellite. Nine players compete at each of the nine tables. The winner of each table advances to the final satellite table, and the winner there earns a seat (worth $10,000) in the WSOP finals with the Web site passing along the entry fee.

As a result, a poker champion is just as likely to wind up being a 21-year-old online poker nerd as a hardboiled pro. One such pro, the legendary Brunson, who won the WSOP finals in 1976 and 1977, finished 53rd this year, collecting $45,000.

This year’s WSOP finals saw 226 players win prizes from $5 million to $10,000 – many of them online entrants.

The Internet, it seems, has democratized poker. “These Internet players can be very strong,” said Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, who won the title in 2000 and placed 26th this year, winning $120,000. “You learn a lot faster online because you get to play a lot more hands.”

Ferguson cuts a colorful gunslinger image on the poker circuit with long dark hair and a beard, a black cowboy hat and eyes hidden behind sunglasses. The menacing persona belies Ferguson’s Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA. He started out online more than a decade ago when Internet poker was in its infancy.

Online poker explosion
Today, at least 40,000 to 50,000 people are playing Internet poker for cash or prizes during peak hours, according to PokerPulse.com, a Web site that monitors player traffic in online card rooms. During a typical 24-hour period, over $90 million crosses cyber poker tables, according to the Web site.

“I never thought poker could get this big,” Ferguson said after signing autographs and posing for photos with fans at a break in the WSOP. “And it comes down to two things, the Internet and TV.”

Televised poker has also popularized the game, especially among 20-somethings, and has served as a tutorial for poker novices hoping to strike it rich. ESPN, the Travel Channel and Bravo all broadcast taped Texas Hold ‘em tournaments.

Last year’s World Series finals champion was a 27-year old accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker, who qualified for the tournament, and eventually won $2.5 million, with a $39 investment in an Internet poker competition.

ESPN has shown Moneymaker’s improbable victory in the 2003 WSOP dozens of times, making him an icon akin to a rock star on college campuses where Texas Hold ‘em has taken root and flourished.

“These college kids see some 22- or 24- or 26-year-old win a million dollars and they all want to do it,” said Mike Sexton, a poker Web site consultant and TV commentator for the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel.

Of the nine players who went to the WSOP final table this year, Matt Dean, a 25-year-old aspiring math teacher from The Woodlands, Texas, was perhaps the least likely to get that far. He has been playing poker for only about a year-and-a-half – mostly on the Internet, he said. He and his fraternity buddies at Southwestern University had their interest aroused by the TV poker shows.

Last school year, he was a long-term substitute teacher earning about $80 a day. He played his way into the World Series finals with a $32 buy-in in an Internet preliminary. Finishing seventh, Dean won $675,000.

He’s put his teaching plans on hold since a poker Web site offered to finance his seat in a tournament in Ireland. “Teaching is in my blood,” Dean said. “But I might never have the opportunity to travel like this on a free roll.”

That a novice player like Dean, starting online with a meager stake, could advance to the final table of poker’s marquee event while poker pros and former champions failed to place in the money has some wondering whether luck has replaced skill in world-class events.

Phil Gordon, a pro player and commentator on a TV celebrity poker show, says “There is still a terrific amount of skill involved in this game.”

Case in point is Dan Harrington, a reserved Bostonian-turned-Californian who wears a Red Sox cap for luck. He finished fourth this year. In 2003, Harrington went to the final table and placed third. In 1995, he won the world championship. Those accomplishments don’t come from luck alone.

Changing the game
Lederer, considered to have one of the most analytical minds in poker, is stoical about the advent of online poker and the players it produces.

“It’s turned into a different kind of event,” Lederer said of the World Series No-Limit Texas Hold ‘em finals. “There was a time when, if you were a good poker player, you would be disappointed if you never won this event. Now, you can’t feel that way.”

Raymer, who spent about $2,600 online playing his way into the World Series finals, had some live tournament experience, but his best finish had been a $48,000 prize.

“I’m not sitting here today because I’m the best player in the world, I’m not,” he said modestly from behind the $5 million in cash. “I still have 10 times more to learn.”

Moneymaker, last year’s winner, is a cover boy for gambling magazines, gets stopped in airports and malls, and is shopping his story in Hollywood. Raymer expects similar instant celebrity after ESPN begins airing this year’s tournament next month.

But the Connecticut lawyer also realizes that his $5 million payday was the result of a simple fact of life in any poker game, whether it’s at the kitchen table, in cyberspace or at the fabled Horseshoe Casino.

“I got the right cards,” Raymer said, “at the right time.”