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When the trustees of the Belknap Mill Society
decided to hold a poker tournament last spring,
the idea raised a few eyebrows. Some at the
nonprofit, which runs an art and history center
and maintains a historic mill, saw a Texas
Holdem tournament as a departure from the
mission. Certainly it was different from the
society's traditional fundraiser, a used book
sale.
But then, in a single evening of poker, the
society took in twice what it can make with the
four-day book sale. Goodbye, reservations.
Hello, new fundraiser.
Generally, "our members are not gamblers," said
Mary Boswell, executive director of the mill
society, which will host another poker
tournament Oct. 9. "(But) we have to make
pragmatic decisions about income. . . . And this
is a successful fundraiser."
To
say the least. Poker tournaments have spread
like milfoil, offering nonprofits a chance to
capitalize on the card-playing craze and make
$10,000 or more in a single day. Though gambling
- including poker games played for money, even
among friends - is illegal in New Hampshire,
charities and other nonprofits can hold "games
of chance," provided they register them with the
attorney general's office and the local police.
That covers everything from cow-pie bingo to ice
out, where people guess what day an object will
melt through the ice, according Audrey Blodgett
of the state attorney general's Charitable Trust
Division.
Blodgett handles all the licensing requests sent
to the Charitable Trust Division. Until last
year, she had never seen an application for
Texas Holdem. Now, half the paperwork coming
across her desk is generated by requests to hold
the popular poker game. Yesterday alone,
Blodgett fielded new applications from the VFW
in East Rochester, the Rotary Club in Laconia
and a semi-pro football team in Keene, all
wanting to hold tournaments in the coming weeks.
"She's overwhelmed, I have to tell you,"said
Jamie Timbas, who manages Manchester Bingo and
Concord Bingo, a pair of halls that run several
nights a week of charity-affiliated bingo. Six
months ago, he added a Texas Holdem event in
Manchester, hoping to draw on the cable
TV-fueled national poker craze. Charging $100
per player (for $1,500 worth of poker chips),
Timbas quickly filled 225 table seats and had to
turn away 100 more.
"It's amazing," Timbas said. The now-weekly
poker events in Manchester draw 1,000 players in
the course of a day, between Texas Holdem
entrants and those who play at open tables with
$2 betting. The first 10 events grossed half a
million dollars, Timbas said.
On
a given night, Manchester Bingo pays out about
$14,000 in prize money to the top 27 tournament
finishers, with the winner claiming $5,000. Each
nonprofit group is legally allowed to run 10
games of chance a year, so the organizations
cycle through Timbas's hall in 10-event phases;
each group takes home about $30,000 in the end,
he said.
The state receives no money from games of
chance, with each organization's $25 application
fee going to the local city or town. That may
change. With the lucrative Texas Holdem
tournaments proliferating, Blodgett was asked to
testify in front of a legislative committee. The
Legislature will likely take up the issue of
whether to create new regulations for poker in
its next session, she said.
Starting Oct. 7, Timbas will add Texas Holdem
tournaments to the lineup at Concord Bingo
(located in Pembroke), with St. George Greek
Orthodox Church of Manchester as the first
scheduled organization.
The poker craze has "spawned a whole new
generation of gamblers," Timbas said. The bingo
players who flock to his two halls by the
thousands each week are mostly women over the
age of 50. The poker players, on the other hand,
tend to be males in their 20s. But that's
changing, he said, as more and more women get
into the game.
Industry experts estimate that some 50 to 80
million Americans play poker. Though the game
has been popular for ages, poker, especially the
widely televised Texas Holdem version, has
really taken off in the last two years, said
Stanley Sludikoff, editor and publisher of the
California-based Poker Player newspaper and the
founder of Gambling Times, the first popular
glossy publication devoted to nationwide gaming.
In Texas Holdem, players are dealt two cards,
held face down, that are used in combination
with exposed community cards.
According to Sludikoff, the surge is a result of
synchronicity. Two years ago, the Travel Channel
became the first cable network to regularly
broadcast poker, with its World Poker Tour. At
the same time, offshore-based Internet poker
sites came on the scene, giving everyone with a
computer a chance to play poker and gamble,
regardless of access to a casino or regular
neighborhood game. And the clincher came when
Chris Moneymaker emerged out of nowhere to win
the 2003 World Series of Poker.
The aptly named Moneymaker scored his place in
the $10,000-a-seat tournament by winning a
series of online poker contests, paying only a
$40 entry fee. Then, with a combination of luck
and skill, the Tennessee accountant played his
way past the poker professionals to win $2.5
million. "That's the rags-to-riches story, the
American dream," Sludikoff said. Now, poker is
broadcast on a variety of channels, from ESPN to
Bravo, and entries into local and national
competitions are on the rise.
Locally, Art Phillips bought into poker at just
the right time. After being involved in a
roulette-style casino night to benefit a Laconia
nonprofit, Phillips and a partner decided to
obtain the business that had lent the gaming
tables. They bought Casino Game Rental in 2001,
adding Texas Holdem to their offerings last
year. Phillips, who kept his day job, now sets
up as many as four poker tournaments in a
weekend in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The nonprofits take home between $6,000 and
$12,000 per event, said Phillips, who takes an
undisclosed flat fee rather than a percentage of
the gross. The tournaments he sets up typically
draw more than 100 participants each and pay as
much as $2,500 for first place. Phillips
provides the tables, cards and chips as well as
a dealer tutorial, but state law requires the
nonprofit groups to deal the cards and run the
events themselves.
Phillips will set up both the next Belknap Mill
Society tournament and the David G. Poulin
Charitable Fund Tournament, to be held the same
day in Boscawen. Stephen Cutillo, a Belknap Mill
trustee who served as a dealer in the last
event, praised the tournament for bringing an
excellent financial return for a one-day
commitment. Plus, it was fun. But he wonders how
long the poker craze will last, and whether "the
goose that lays the golden egg" will be killed
if every organization in the state starts
running poker tournaments.
But Timbas, the bingo hall operator, said he
thinks poker will continue to grow, especially
as more women pick up the game. Sludikoff
agreed. "There's no immediate ceiling to this
thing. There's nowhere near enough tables and
public card rooms to accommodate (the people who
want to play)," he said. He thinks TV is the
key, because the instructive commentary and
card-revealing cameras bring new viewers into
the game step-by-step: "I don't think we're
anywhere near peaking."
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