Jeff Haney relays some advice from a poker giant’s CEO to small cardroom execs: Make established tours work for you

By Jeff Haney

Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2006 | 7:07 a.m.

Steve Lipscomb, the chief executive of the World Poker Tour, has some advice for poker executives at small and midsize cardrooms around the nation.

Don't worry about competing against the major worldwide tours such as World Poker and the World Series of Poker.

Work with the big national brands rather than against them.

Go grass roots.

"I would hate to try to launch the World Poker Tour today," Lipscomb, who founded the company nearly five years ago, said at the recent Global Gaming Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center. "Candidly, I wouldn't launch the business today, because the opportunity isn't there, with two large brands in the marketplace and three or four others that are kind of struggling to keep going.

"Remember when the World Poker Tour did what it did, TV all of a sudden created the poker boom and then the World Series (of Poker) put that format on TV so that people watched it even more because it was on ESPN. When all of those things happened, there were not already massive brands in the marketplace."

Today, with World Poker in the middle of its fifth season of live tournaments filmed for the Travel Channel (Cox cable channel 66), Lipscomb sees a shakeout taking place among poker shows he considers lesser competitors.

If there weren't too many poker shows already, the new law that aims to crack down on Internet gambling could have a dire effect on any programs that have been backed by money from online poker rooms, Lipscomb said.

"The reason there were 15 poker shows was that sites were using them as loss leaders to get you to play poker at their site," Lipscomb said. "So without these sites propping up the shows, a lot of them are going away or will go away. Without those revenues, the business model doesn't work."

Lipscomb advised managers of traditional casino poker rooms, even small operations consisting of a couple of tables, to generate buzz - and business - by running tournaments, including satellites to World Poker Tour events. At least a dozen small cardrooms nationwide currently have such an affiliation with World Poker, in states such as Arizona, New York, North Dakota and elsewhere.

Special appearances by "celebrity" poker players - who often have books or DVDs to promote - could augment those tournaments, Lipscomb said.

An autograph session by poker star Chris Ferguson, for example, drew a line of fans out the door in conjunction with a World Series of Poker circuit tournament at Lake Tahoe earlier this year.

Lipscomb also described a formerly struggling poker room in Reno that launched its own annual poker tournament, then used weekly satellites to lure higher-rolling casino table-game players into the joint.

"A dead room all of a sudden came to life," Lipscomb said. "It was the most successful promotion they ever had ... What you can do are these grass-roots kind of things that will have more of a payoff for your property."

Las Vegas poker insider Nolan Dalla advised poker executives to work with traditional and online media outlets to publicize their tournaments once they have been established.

A spokesman for the World Series of Poker and an author himself, Dalla pointed out that poker players are notoriously hungry for news about the poker tournament circuit and its personalities.

"Poker players, by and large, are the most literary of any gambling sector," Dalla said. "If you go to Borders, go to Barnes & Noble, and look at the gambling books, how many books are there on craps and blackjack? Maybe four or five, maybe 10 on blackjack. You'll see 60 or 70 on poker.

"Poker players read. Poker players follow what's going on in poker tournaments. I'm telling you, poker players are dedicated."

Poker's growth might have slowed since the launch of World Poker, Lipscomb said. But there's still plenty of room for innovation. There are still plenty of at-home poker players who will become motivated to visit a public cardroom and "do that thing I saw on TV, and I know I can do it better, because they're all boneheads," he said.

"I did my first news interview on 'the end of the poker boom' three months after our show began," Lipscomb said. "We like to say (poker) has been around for 100 years and it will be around another 100 years."