Why Is Poker So Popular?

Every day it seems that in one form or another, the game of poker is slowly taking over the world. Televised poker tournaments have generated massive worldwide interest in the game. Casual players have become tournament champions and millionaires have been made overnight. The proliferation of new technologies has made it possible for players anywhere on the planet to experience poker in a virtual setting. Whether you're browsing the web or surfing through the channels of you TV, it's hard not to bump into evidence of poker's sensational rise as the most massively appealing game in the world.

Poker has been around for quite sometime, so what exactly caused this game to become so popular so quickly? The finger, in my opinion, has to be pointed first and foremost at television. A few years ago, you might catch a rare glimpse of a poker tournament on ESPN 2 in the middle of the night, if you were lucky. Now it seems like poker tournaments are on TV 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just waking up in the morning, there's bound to be a World Poker Tour tourney on the Travel Channel. Staying up all night with nothing to watch, there's has to be some poker action of Fox Sports. Missed what happened in the 2005 World Series of Poker? Not a problem. ESPN reruns the entire tournament on a weekly basis (I lost count of how many times I've seen Aussie-sensation Joe Hachem say "Pass the sugar!").

Baseball games are televised all the time, but you don't see more people deciding to play baseball because they saw it on television. There's something else at play here and it has something to do with underdog, long-shot amateurs overcoming ridiculous odds and winning millions of dollars.

In 2003, Chris Moneymaker made headlines when won his first bracelet at the WSOP main event. Moneymaker qualified for the WSOP after winning a satellite tourney on Poker Stars. This amateur bested a field of over 800 entrants and converted a $39 poker room deposit into a $2.5 million payday. ESPN's coverage of the event and its subsequent efforts to constantly re-air the WSOP, forced people to take notice of what was transpiring in the world of poker. Without having to pay the $10,000 buy-in, an amateur player with an award-winning poker name stunned the professionals around him and began an uprising in the poker community.

Online players were no longer seen as second-rate. The following year, Greg Raymer, another online amateur qualifier, repeated the impossible. He beat out over 2500 players and took home $5 million. In 2005, Joe Hachem, another unknown player, bested a field of over 5000 and walked away with a bracelet and $7.5 million.

Look at the growth of the number of WSOP entrants since Moneymaker's dramatic 2003 victory. From 2003 to 2004, the number of entrants tripled (from 839 to 2,576). Twice the number of entrants would compete in the main event the following year (from 2,576 to 5,619). The 2006 WSOP main event promises to be another record breaker as far as entrants go and the winner will take home $10 million.

In poker, people don't just want to root for the underdog, they want to be the underdog. The recent success of amateur online players at the WSOP has created an atmosphere of why-not-me. Casual players now see themselves as possible bracelet winners and even Hollywood actors are getting in on the action.

Poker's booming popularity isn't just the result of increased TV exposure. In this age of reality-inspired entertainment, people enjoy seeing average Joe's take home millions of dollars. There's a big sense of it-could-happen-to-you going on here and as a result, more and more people are turning to online poker. It's not that everyone online wants to win a million dollars. People just want to be involved with something special and poker's phenomenal rise in popularity is defiantly something extraordinary.

Rick ?Stone Face? Ellers started playing poker while he was a paratrooper stationed in Fort Bragg, NC. He currently writes part time for PokerListings.com where you can read about Poker Chips and the exciting World Series of Poker.