The World Poker Tour: Past and Present

While the World Series of Poker is our link to the past, the World Poker Tour is as responsible as any party for the present cultural revolution poker has undergone. Along with the World Series, it’s the one circuit whose name has transcended the industry to the point of mainstream recognition.

Founded by poker enthusiast Steve Lipscomb, the WPT became a plausible idea when Dr. Henry Orenstein received the patent for hole-card technology. ‘The lipstick camera’ was first used in the World Heads-Up Poker Championship at the Isle of Man in 2001, but its importance only became obvious when Lipscomb applied it to the World Poker Tour.

The camera allowed the viewer at home to watch poker in a new way, able to see a player’s hole cards and play along with them as a result. World Poker Tour Enterprises, the holding company of the WPT, held its first tournament using the cameras beginning May 31st, 2002, coming to a broadcast agreement with the Travel Channel on the basis of its international schedule. It’s since proven to be by far the most successful program in Travel Channel history, remaining so today.

The WPT’s Five Diamond World Poker Classic aired Sunday, March 30, 2003, and within weeks was being hailed as the smash hit amongst an otherwise weak selection of new shows for that season. World of this new reality concept spread quickly, with Americans previously forced to hide their poker affection allowed to explore it, while the social acceptance brought by television recognition allowed others their first explorations.

With unprecedented money crossing the screen on one nail-biting decision after another, the world was hooked. With a colorful cast of recurring characters, the opportunity for the everyman to compete with them and the money, the WPT was a natural progression; the love child of Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Since its inception, the show has been hosted by professional poker player Mike Sexton and poker legacy Vince Van Patten, a successful player in his own right whose father Dick hosted a number of World Series of Poker tapings in the early nineties. Joining them have been a bevy of hostesses, most famously Shana Hiatt, who enjoyed immense popularity in the show’s first three seasons. The present hostess is Sabina Gadecki.

Now taping its fifth season, the World Poker Tour now enjoys seventeen stops a year, mostly for a $10,000 buy-in, mostly in the United States, with occasional stops in Canada, France and the Caribbean. It remains the Ying to the World Series of Poker’s Yang and is at the forefront of poker’s international expansion.