The World Poker Tour

The World Poker Tour (WPT) is a series of international poker tournaments featuring most of the world's top professional players. (Room is made for amateur buy-in and play-ins though.) Attorney and television producer Steven Lipscomb launched the World Poker Tour and now serves as CEO of WPT Enterprises (WPTE), the firm that controls the World Poker Tour. This method of inventing a poker tournament series was cloned with great success by England's John Duthie. (See our European Poker Tour article.)

World Poker Tour Tournaments

The World Poker Tour is a collection of Texas hold 'em poker tournaments held internationally, but most of the events take place in the United States. The television show and the broadcasts of the World Series of Poker have led to a boom in the world of table gaming across America, in local casino poker rooms and online. The drawing power of the WPT and most other poker tournaments is that anyone who can pay the "buy-in" (an amount ranging from $2,500 to $25,000) or win a "satellite" tournament is able to compete against the top professional players.

The key sponsors of the World Poker Tour are casinos and online poker sites. The show, which is syndicated internationally, is co-hosted by World Series of Poker winner Mike Sexton and actor Vince Van Patten.

In January 2008, the World Poker Tour announced a set of tournaments for women, known as WPT Ladies. The first season will have five events, with buy-ins ranging from $300 to $1,500. The final table of the final event will be televised.

World Poker Tour Commentary

The show's hosts Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten seem to be recording their commentary live as the tournament happens, and they have occasionally interacted with the players during the game, but it is widely known that their comments about hole cards are recorded after the tournament takes place.

Certain state gaming regulations prohibit them from observing a live feed of the so-called "hole card cameras". Consequently, the broadcast audio is a mix of the live recording and commentary recorded in post-production. This is not meant to deceive viewers, but to maintain compliance with the law.

Debut Season

The tour had its debut season in the latter part of 2002 and early part of 2003, climaxing with the WPT Championship in April 2003 at the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first season aired on the Travel Channel on American cable television in the spring of 2003 and was replayed ad infinitum. The show made its network debut on February 1, 2004 on NBC with a special "Battle Of Champions" tournament, which aired against CBS coverage of the Super Bowl XXXVIII pre-game show, a bold move in America where football and especially the Super Bowl is king. The Travel Channel aired the first five seasons of the Tour, with varying degrees of success. In April 2007, WPTE announced that the series would move to GSN for its sixth season in the spring of 2008. The first WPT tournament to air on GSN, the Mirage Poker Showdown, debuted on March 24, 2008.

The World Poker Tour Legal History

The WPT has a rather strange legal history -- in July 2006, seven poker professionals sued WPTE, alleging violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the California Cartwright Act, and intentional interference with contract. Serious claims made by serious players -- Chris Ferguson, Andy Bloch, Annie Duke, Joe Hachem, Phil Gordon, Howard Lederer, and Greg Raymer -- who alleged that WPTE's standard release forms, required for participation in WPTE events, are anti-competitive and were designed to interfere with these player's contractual obligations to other companies and tournament series.

The anti-competition claim is based on the fact that WPTE's contracts with the casinos that host its tournaments bar any other casinos owned by the same parent companies from hosting non-WPTE poker events. This is a mouthful of legal-ese basically saying that players want to own the rights to their own images, or at least have the ability to make their own decisions about their careers. As in any burgeoning industry, the legal issues surrounding contracts are rather messy. Hachem and Raymer dropped out of the lawsuit before its eventual settlement.

World Poker Tour Technical Innovations

Fans of the World Poker Tour find it particularly interesting because of technical innovations such as the ability to see the players' hole cards through a small camera in front of them on the poker table. While this was not a WPT innovation -- it was first seen on the UK program Late Night Poker -- it has become a kind of trademark of the WPT. With the success of the show, special programs, such as the "Hollywood Home Game" (featuring celebrities playing for charity) and "Ladies Night" (featuring six top women poker players) were developed. The aforementioned Ladies' World Poker Tour may have sprung from the popularity of Ladies Night.

In 2004, the World Poker Tour created a Walk of Fame, inducting poker legends Doyle Brunson and Gus Hansen as well as actor James Garner and others.

Now in its sixth season of broadcast, the World Poker Tour remains one of the highest rated television programs on cable. The first three seasons of WPT are also available on DVD. These DVDs have had their ups and downs -- the second season DVD set featured audio commentary by several of the players, a very revealing and educational addition to an incredible DVD set. Unfortunately, the third season is only available in a "Best Of the Tournament" format, featuring only half of the episodes originally aired. Let's hope some further innovations are made in the world of World Poker Tour DVDs.

A series of spin-off tournaments, titled the Professional Poker Tour, began filming in 2004. Broadcast of the series was delayed, in part because of a dispute with the Travel Channel over rights -- more legal issues. In the fall of 2005, WPTE announced that "a cable channel" (believed to be ESPN) had withdrawn from bidding for the PPT series, and that WPTE was negotiating with the Travel Channel to air the series. The series began regular broadcast July 5, 2006, but was suspended after one season as WPTE couldn't find a television home for a second season.