THE DAILY Goes One-On-One With WPT Founder Steve Lipscomb

WPT Founder & President Steve Lipscomb

Attorney, documentary filmmaker and former Second City trouper STEVE LIPSCOMB is also the Founder and President of the World Poker Tour, for which he negotiates deals, supervises production and serves as impresario as he sells the WPT as a sports league.  Lipscomb led his company to an IPO in August, struck a deal with Anheuser-Busch’s Michelob AmberBock to be the WPT’s first major tour sponsor and was preparing to launch a second series of shows featuring just the professional poker superstars.  On the eve of the WPT’s third season on the Travel Channel, Lipscomb spoke with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.

Q: What is the World Poker Tour?

Lipscomb: It is a series of major poker events at the best gaming properties in the world.  The World Series of Poker -- the one that’s on ESPN -- is the biggest tournament in poker; we have the next 16.  We are the league. We’re the NBA of poker.  Just as you have the owners and the large franchises in the NBA, we have basically the same thing.  We have Foxwoods, Bellagio, Borgata -- all of those rolled up into this thing called the World Poker Tour that we’ve put together into televised poker.

Q: How did the World Poker Tour originate?

Lipscomb: In 2001, poker had been on television for an awful long time.  Nobody watched and nobody cared.  That was because if you look at the way poker was done, before the World Poker Tour, it was pretty impossible to watch.  I pitched poker to as many networks as you can imagine, saying, “We can make poker a phenomenon if we do it right on television.”  I went out and raised $3.5[M] with the commitment to not just film these shows but to buy airtime if we had to in order to prove that there was an audience.  You see tons of poker on television today, in essence, really, just taking the format that we spent a whole lot of money on and eight months editing.

Q: Poker has been around a long time.  How do you explain the current fascination with card games?  In addition to the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker, there are the best-selling books “Positively Fifth Street” and “Bringing Down the House.”

Lipscomb: Putting poker in prime time and the way that we’ve re-created it -- so now you can watch it and it’s interesting -- is the big driver.  And along with that, lots of things have joined in.  If you talk to JIM MCMANUS, who wrote “Positively Fifth Street,” he’ll tell you that the World Poker Tour made it possible for his book to explode into mainstream.  And at the World Series of Poker the year after we began airing, [WSOP Tournament Dir] MATT SAVAGE basically thanked the World Poker Tour for the huge jump in numbers at their tournament.  So, it really is this kind of business that we’ve created at the World Poker Tour that has taken something that lots of people were doing and ignited a whole new life to it.

Q: You called the World Poker Tour, “The best kind of reality television you can get.”  What did you mean by that?

Lipscomb: When you’re telling a story, you’re trying to find something inside the human condition that you can reveal.  Well, when the World Poker Tour puts you at one of our tables, and every table has millions of dollars on the line, and you’re watching a player -- it’s usually an ordinary player vs. a superstar player -- make million-dollar decisions and you have 17 cameras that let you see every pore and every bead of sweat, that’s real reality television.  So much of what happens in reality fare today is overproduced.  You can almost look behind the scenes and see the producer making people fight, or do whatever it is they do.  It’s become very formulaic.  We’re just like sports -- the real thing.  These are real people who are about to win or lose life-changing money based on one decision.  And that makes for great TV.

Q: The World Poker Tour puts the television viewer at the table.  So, part of the attraction is that it’s a vicarious thrill?

Lipscomb: The way poker used to be done, you had to almost do it as a documentary.  Our mission statement specifically said that we were going to transport poker into a televised mainstream sport to the nation.  The whole concept was the thrill you could get from being the person sitting in that seat.  We had to translate that into an experience for the audience.

Q: Among the 17 cameras that follow the game is one that reveals to the TV viewer each player’s hole, or face-down, card.  That’s a big part of the drama, isn’t it?

Lipscomb: That is part of the new language that we created, the graphics language.  When a player looks at his or her card, that information is immediately put on the [TV] screen.  No other player at the table sees the card.  So [the viewer at home] can compare that card with all the other cards, and play along with the game interactively.  If I were to look at anything that was a magic elixir that we injected into poker to transform the whole thing, it was the creation of that code.

Q: I read where you said, “We live in a country founded on the notion of democracy, and there’s no more democratic a sport than poker.”  You make it sound almost patriotic to play.

Lipscomb: This is the great American card game.  It was born and bred here.  I believe poker is to games what jazz is to music.  It’s Americana.  Everybody’s equal, and if you dare to take a chance, you can play it as well as anybody who’s been playing it for years.

Q: What kind of ratings does the World Poker Tour get?

Lipscomb: We do a 1.2 to a 1.5 in a two-hour block, often building and doubling our audience in two hours.  I think that is perhaps unique in the history of cable television.  I don’t know of any other two-hour television show that exists like ours and that has performed the way we have.  In just our second season we were often averaging 1.7 or 1.8.  Those are monster numbers on any cable station, but on the Travel Channel they just are mind-numbing.

Q: The WPT is the highest-rated program on the Travel Channel?

Lipscomb: By a long shot.

Q: Fortune magazine reported that the audience in the second season of the World Poker Tour grew 63%, to an average of 1.3 million viewers.

Lipscomb: That’s absolutely right, and it all depends on how you view these numbers and what kind of sports multiples: 1.3 million households is pretty much what it turns out to be. Our show airs three times a week on the Travel Channel, so we figure anywhere from three to five million people watch the show in a given week.  The repeats actually sometimes beat the original premieres, depending on what else is going on in television land.

Q: Who is your audience?

WPT Finding Success On Both Sides Of The Gender Line

Lipscomb: The demographics have been pretty remarkable, and what Madison Avenue is dying to find.  The 21- to 49-year-old males compose a large portion of our audience.  We figured we wouldn’t get more than 20% of a female audience, but we’ve actually averaged about 30%.  Women are now starting to play and get invited to all-women poker nights or co-ed nights.  I met a woman on the plane the other day who said she told her husband the one thing she wanted for her birthday was to have a poker tournament.  That’s pretty doggone new.  I think, in essence, what we’ve done is take this 50-80 million person market that never was branded until the WPT came along, and we’ve managed to brand it and at the same time expand its ranks in this very interesting field.

Q: How has that translated into advertising?

Lipscomb: In the first season the challenge was, “Who’s going to be willing to be associated with poker?  Who’s going to be willing to take on the potential negative association?” Well, that has just gone away.  We’ve been very fortunate to have Anheuser-Busch come in the second season.  Now they’re on with a larger brand, Michelob, in season three. That’s the official beer of the World Poker Tour.  And everything from car companies to restaurants ... pretty much the stigma is gone in a very short amount of time.  It’s been a very lucrative deal for the Travel Channel and other broadcasters who have put it on air.

Q: Any other sponsorships?

Lipscomb: We’re looking into various other sponsors of the World Poker Tour.  We’re somewhat limited because of our deal with the Travel Channel.  On the other hand, we work together in a good partnership and we’re exploring other options just because there are more and more options out there.  So, I would say, yes, it is one of the growth opportunities in our business.

Q: You also went public last summer.  Tell me about that.

Lipscomb: We’re one of those enviable companies that’s had a successful idea, and we have a healthy bottom line.  We’re not losing money; we’re making money.  And we’re now strategically working to invest those dollars into places that will allow the business itself to grow.  And sponsorship is one of the areas that we will see growth in.  A big part of our future is the international online gaming play that we are making beginning in April.

Q: What’s the biggest misunderstanding or misperception the public has about the game?

Lipscomb Feels That WPT Helping Debunk Old Poker Stereotypes

Lipscomb: I think the biggest misperception people had about poker were the people who were playing it.  Still, we fight these stereotypes.  ESPN has put out a drama, “Tilt,” which goes right back to the old misperceptions of what the poker world is.  It’s so much easier to want to think that everyone is a cowboy with a gun on the table.  But the thing that I think we changed more than anything is this belief that the people who are playing are those old guys.  What’s happened since the World Poker Tour began is this great influx of young players who are enjoying the space we have created because now they know it’s safe to go in and play in casinos, and they’re just filling in in droves.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing the WPT?

Lipscomb: From the very beginning our biggest challenge has been keeping up.  We have, probably in the shortest amount of time in anyone’s recollection, created a sports phenomenon with a gargantuan market.  And we just keep expanding in smart ways as fast as we can.  But there are just so many opportunities.  And keeping up with those opportunities is our biggest challenge.

Q: What is your basic business philosophy?

Lipscomb: It’s the entrepreneur rule.  We started this business on a shoestring.  We had resources, but we never spent them unless we needed to.  We were four people in four offices.  Today we are a company with a market cap, depending on the day, between $250[M] and $350[M].  We still operate as if we were entrepreneurs, and I think that’s what will carry us into the next ten or 20 years.

Q: What is the best call you have made?

Lipscomb: Finding the right partner. LYLE BERMAN at Lakes Entertainment has been a fantastic partner from the beginning.

Q: What is your favorite piece of music?

Lipscomb: “Nessun Dorma” from “Turandot.”

Q: What is your favorite movie?

Lipscomb: “Life of Brian.”

Q: Who is your favorite actress?

Lipscomb: JODIE FOSTER.

Q: What is your favorite book?

Lipscomb: “Zorba the Greek.”

Q: Where is your favorite vacation spot?

Lipscomb: New Hampshire.

Q: What is your favorite quote?

Lipscomb: P.T. BARNUM’s “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Q: Who is the athlete you most enjoy watching?

Lipscomb: MICHAEL JORDAN.

Q: What is your favorite sporting event?

Lipscomb: The NBA Finals.