The 2003 Poker Boom explained: Hole-Card Cam

In this series I’m going to try to outline the major forces that came together to produce the 2003 “Poker Boom” and why these forces will likely never be repeated again. In my opinion there were actually five factors that had a hand in creating the Poker Boom:

• Chris Moneymaker
• Positively Fifth Street
• Rounders (poker is a skill game)
• Online Poker
• The Hole Card Camera

It’s really hard to factor the importance of each in the grand scheme of things, since they all essentially played off of one another. So in this series I’ll take a look at each factor individually and explain its role in the 2003 Poker Boom and how it meshed with the other aspects of the Poker Boom.

*Since this is the last installment of the series, each of the other factors has already been compared and contrasted to the advent of the hole-card camera, so even though I have explained each multiple times in other posts I’m going to forego that part of the article this time around.*

The Hole-Card Camera

The hole-card camera developed by Henry Orenstein was enough of an innovation to warrant Henry’s induction into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2006. The hole-card camera could very well be the single most important reason for poker’s success in the new millennia, and the fact that Orenstein got into the Hall of Fame just a few years after his invention really took off is proof of this: Everyone knew the Hole-Card Camera had changed poker forever.

The Hole-Card Camera actually did two things for poker:

• #1 – It made poker a viable television product

Without the hole-card camera it’s likely ESPN would have given up on the World Series of Poker, and it’s almost a certainty that the World Poker Tour would have never come into being. The hole-card camera brought an entire new segment of the population into the game, a segment that would have no interest in televised poker (and therefore poker in general) without SEEING what the players were doing with their cards, and how differently they played compared to the games they were used to.

• #2 – It proved to the masses that poker was more than just a card game

The hole-card camera also proved to the entire world (besides Mormon’s and the Christian right) that poker is not simply a game of chance, played by degenerates in the back-rooms of bars or at smoke-filled casinos, but was in fact a game of skill: A high level of skill to be exact.

With this understanding it was only a matter of time before anyone able to shuffle a deck of cards thought they could be the next big thing in the game.