People love to play games online, but they don't often like to watch games on television. All that has changed over the past few months. The hot new sport on television doesn't involve a ball or a bat, or even a skateboard. All you need is a deck of cards to play the Internet's hottest sport, poker. Yes, poker is huge these days, thanks to the popularity of cable television broadcasts of the World Series of Poker on ESPN and a new, second series of poker programs called World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel. Searches related to poker and these two television programs have increased substantially over the past month.
There are lots of varieties of poker getting searches -- video poker, draw poker, and yes, even strip poker, but the hottest game is Texas Hold 'em, the brand of poker played in these televised tournaments. Specific searches for Texas Hold 'em are now triple what they were at the beginning of the year. Hold 'em players each receive two face-down cards and share five face-up cards in the middle of the table ("the board"), making their best five-card hand from those seven cards.
The World Series of Poker takes place each April and May at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, and the highlight is the No Limit Hold 'em tournament. This year, 839 people paid the $10,000 entry fee -- or qualified in some way to have someone else pay it for them. One of those who didn't pay himself was the eventual champion, a 27-year-old amateur from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker. He had spent $40 on an online poker site, won their tournament, and they sponsored him at the World Series. Moneymaker topped hundreds of men who play poker for a living, and turned that $40 turned into $2.5 million in winnings.
