How the Hole-Card Camera Turned Poker Into TV

For most of its history on television, poker had a problem no director could fix: the cards that mattered were hidden. Viewers watched players push chips into the middle of the table and fold, and had no idea who was bluffing. A small camera that could show a player’s two private cards to the audience, without showing them to opponents, changed that. Its inventor was Henry Orenstein, a toy maker and poker player. This feature follows the camera from his idea to the Travel Channel and ESPN, and looks at how it reshaped what people think poker is. It draws on the Las Vegas Sun, Grantland’s oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker, PokerStrategy, SportsBusiness Daily, Time and Today. Where accounts disagree, the article says so.

Poker Nobody Could Follow

Poker was on television long before the boom. PokerStrategy reported that CBS aired footage of the World Series of Poker Main Event in the 1970s, but that without a way to see the cards the players held, it did not prove popular, and nearly thirty years of lukewarm ratings made broadcasters wary. Time wrote in 2003 that poker was first broadcast in 1993, so sources do not agree on what counts as the first broadcast, and this article avoids calling any single show the first.

The Las Vegas Sun described the situation in the mid-1990s: poker could be found on cable, but usually in a middle-of-the-night slot next to programs such as wild turkey hunting. Time reported the World Series commentator Lon McEachern comparing hold’em without hole cards to a tennis match played in the dark, with the lights switched on only after the point was over. Hold’em, the game of the Main Event, gives each player two private cards, and nothing on screen could show them.

Players on the 2003 Main Event felt the gap too. In Grantland’s oral history, Cory Zeidman, who finished 39th, said the invention was more important than anything else in taking poker further, because it gave viewers inside information about who was bluffing, and described the older broadcasts, with Gabe Kaplan commentating, as torturous. The cards were the story, and the cameras could not show them.

A Toy Maker’s Idea

Orenstein’s own account is simple. He told Grantland that in 1981 or 1982 he saw a poker show on ESPN in which six hands in a row ended without a call, so viewers never saw what happened. He thought a camera could show the professionals’ cards, called in his engineers, and recalled having a working model in about four weeks. That timeline is his recollection and is not independently documented in the sources used here.

The Sun profiled him in November 2005, when he was 81. It described an inventor who created the Transformers action figures, which the paper called among the best-selling toys in history. His production company was then filming “High Stakes Poker” at the Golden Nugget. Orenstein told the Sun: “It’s the reason we see poker the way it’s presented today.”

The invention met resistance. The Sun reported that a decade earlier, players had told him hole cards were hallowed information they would never willingly reveal. Orenstein’s answer was blunt. As he put it to the Sun: “Poker is an exciting game, but without the hole cards, you can’t see what’s going on.” The point of the design was to show a player’s cards to the audience without showing them to opponents. Nolan Dalla told Grantland that early setups were awkward: staff sometimes had to ask players to move a couple of inches or show their cards for longer.

From Britain to the Travel Channel

The first television uses are described differently by different outlets. One PokerStrategy history said the camera debuted in 1997 on Channel 4’s Late Night Poker in Britain. Another PokerStrategy article said Late Night Poker started in 1999 and that the camera was invented before the show. Both agree that the British show was an early adopter and popularized the idea. This article treats the exact date of the first broadcast as unsettled.

In the United States, the key figure was Steve Lipscomb, who created the World Poker Tour. PokerStrategy reported that he took the hole-card camera to the United States about six years later for the WPT’s first season on the Travel Channel, and that the show was an instant hit. A New York magazine feature credited Lipscomb with placing tiny cameras in the table in 2002, and Time quoted him saying the camera made poker a spectator sport. SportsBusiness Daily reported in 2003 that the Travel Channel had its best third quarter and best September ever in ratings and renewed the WPT for a second season, with options for five more.

The dates in these accounts are not identical, so the safest summary is that the camera moved from British television to the WPT in the early 2000s, and that ESPN followed within months.

ESPN’s 2003 World Series

Getting the Cameras Approved

ESPN had aired World Series highlight shows for years. SportsBusiness Daily said ESPN had aired one- and two-hour packages since 1991, while Today.com said since 1994, so accounts differ. What changed in 2003 was that ESPN produced its own seven-episode series for the first time, as part of a five-year rights deal. Matt Maranz of 441 Productions told Grantland he had pitched the World Series as a documentary from about 2000 and been told nobody would watch poker on television.

The cameras needed regulatory approval. In Grantland’s oral history, ESPN’s Fred Christenson said Nevada gaming regulators had to approve the hole-card cameras, and at the last minute they were told the cameras could not be used. Mike Antinoro, an ESPN producer, said the network had to show what security measures it would have, because large sums were at stake. Another participant said a guard was posted outside the curtained-off area with the video monitors. Maranz said Phil Hellmuth helped persuade the officials, and that without him he doubted there would have been cameras. That is Maranz’s account, and the other participants described the approval in their own terms.

Time described the setup the same summer: ESPN taped the event at Binion’s in May and piped the hole-card view into tape machines secured by armed guards, with commentary added in post-production. McEachern told the magazine that viewers saw a representative selection of hands, chosen for excitement.

The Ratings

SportsBusiness Daily published a week-by-week table of the 2003 series. The first three episodes ran with another show before or after them. When ESPN began airing the previous week’s episode as a lead-in on July 29, the numbers rose, and Antinoro said repeats built on each other. The table shows the household ratings.

The pattern is a series that more than doubled its household audience between its first and last episode. Other outlets measured differently. Time reported an average of 1,248,000 viewers against 408,000 in the same slot a year earlier, and Today.com said an average of more than 1.2 million viewers per episode. These are viewers and households, so they are not the same unit. In 2004, SportsBusiness Daily said the final table drew a 2.8 rating, ESPN’s highest for poker to that point, and that the 22-episode series averaged 1.7, a 42 percent increase over 2003.

Why It Changed Poker Culture

The camera changed the viewer’s role. Poker journalist John Vorhaus told Grantland that with hole cams the audience gained an omniscience it never had before, so each player in a hand could be seen as the protagonist of a small story. Today.com quoted analyst Andy Glazer saying television was an overwhelming force in poker’s resurgence, and described the lipstick cameras as one of two root causes, with online poker the other. For the amateur who won the 2003 Main Event, see the hand that sparked the poker boom.

Film saw the same effect. Brian Koppelman, co-writer of Rounders, told Grantland that his team had originally written the final scene so that viewers could not see Matt Damon’s cards. At a test screening, the version in which the audience could see that his character had flopped a straight held viewers on the edge of their seats, while the version without that view drew surprise. He called it exactly the hole-card phenomenon. The movie’s own place in the culture is covered in how Rounders changed poker culture, and its closing scene echoes the 1988 Chan and Seidel final hand.

Television also grew the coverage. Today.com reported that ESPN planned 22 hours of World Series coverage in 2004, up from 7, with 22 cameras at the final table and a camera that showed the next card after a fold. By 2005, the Sun noted, the cameras had even earned a sponsor on ESPN, and viewers had taken them for granted for a couple of years. The televised Main Event that followed is retold in Jamie Gold’s 2006 Main Event run.

The Other Side of the Lens

Television shows a selection. Time reported that ESPN’s shows presented a representative number of exciting hands from a month of play, and SportsBusiness Daily noted that the 2003 Main Event had a record 839 entrants. One player wins; the rest of the field does not, and an hour of television rarely shows the hours of ordinary play or the people who leave empty-handed. Anyone who wants to see what the days are really like can read the Main Event structure and day-by-day guide.

The ratings above date from 2003 and 2004, so they describe those seasons and are not current audience figures.

The cameras created a security question as well. Antinoro told Grantland that there were many ways people could take advantage of access to the cards, which is why the security measures were part of the approval. Real-money poker is legal in some places and not others, and its rules vary by state and venue, so a show on television is not a guide to what is allowed where a viewer lives.

Myths About the Hole-Card Camera

Myth: the camera was invented for the poker boom. Orenstein recalled the idea in 1981 or 1982, and PokerStrategy placed its television debut years before the 2003 broadcasts. The boom came when ESPN and the Travel Channel used it widely.

Myth: broadcasts show every hand. They do not. Time reported that ESPN showed a representative selection of exciting hands, with commentary added after play.

Myth: the camera alone caused the boom. PokerStrategy listed online poker, Chris Moneymaker’s 2003 win and the hole-card camera as three tipping points, and Today.com also pointed to online poker.

What to Read Next

For the hand that defined the 2003 broadcast, read the Moneymaker Bluff. For the movie that Koppelman’s test screening shaped, there is the Rounders feature.

Sources & References

• Las Vegas Sun — How poker player and inventor Henry Orenstein’s miniature cameras made the card game a growing spectator sport
• Grantland — When We Held Kings: the oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker
• PokerStrategy — A Brief History of Televised Poker
• PokerStrategy — The top 5 most important poker TV shows
• SportsBusiness Daily — The Rise Of Televised Poker, Part Two: The Networks
• SportsBusiness Daily — Final Nielsen Ratings From Weekend Sports Events
• Today — A full house
• TIME — Decks, Lies & Videotape
• New York Magazine — The Celebrification of Poker