Poker News

BILOXI, Miss. - Dead Money sat at a casino poker table, his first live game ever. Decked out in Dead Money casual - sunglasses, college logo cap, earring, jeans - he'd picked up poker only six months earlier, watching the pros on TV and playing on the Internet.

Dead Money isn't his name. But it does describe what many of the room's regulars saw when they spotted Wes Dopson, 27, a divorced bartender with two kids and a pile of bills back in Anniston, Ala.

"Dead money," explained Ken Warren, a Biloxi-based professional poker player, "is money put into a pot by a player who has no chance of winning that pot."

Young and inexperienced, but full of the bravado bred by too many TV and Internet games, Dopson is part of a new wave of aggressively inept players filling casino poker rooms along the Gulf coast and elsewhere, chasing riches like modern-day prospectors while raining money on regulars who haven't seen paydays like these since illegal gambling flourished here decades ago.

They've made the game both cool and profitable, prompting an explosion of youthful popularity in casino card rooms that just two years ago resembled retirement rec centers.

Mimicking players from televised tournaments - mirrored sunglasses, ballcaps, unlit cigarettes - they swell rooms like brigades of Poker Youth.

Not long ago casinos were replacing poker rooms with more profitable slot machines; now some rooms are expanding, with waiting times for a table often stretching for hours.

That's not all that has changed. Fueled by the flood of televised Texas hold 'em tournaments on the Travel Channel, ESPN and even the arts network Bravo, these young guns bring an edited-for-TV, risk-it-all style to a game that has long put a premium on patience and nuance.

It would be like basketball learned from a highlight reel of slam dunks, or guitar from an MTV music video. They treat the lowliest cards like lottery tickets - they bet on everything - infuriating purists even as the winnings of many old-line players have jumped as much as 50 percent.

"I love poker. I'm making money. But it's not poker anymore," said Claud Sigmon, a longtime Biloxi pro. "You have to play stupid."

Dopson didn't disappoint his first game's seasoned tablemates: Seven hands after being seated, he'd converted the $40 he couldn't afford to lose into "dead money." He exited 15 minutes after he arrived.

"I lost. I lost pretty damn quick, too," he said afterward, wandering among the slot machines. "I didn't even have time to soak it up. I got cocky in there. But if I had the money, I'd do it again.

"The money they win on TV," he mused. "It's any man's dream to make money by getting lucky without really having to lift a finger."

People have tried to make money without lifting a finger forever on this weathered coast. Illegal gambling was so rampant through the mid-1960s that some hotels openly housed 8,000-square-foot casinos. Authorities assessed a "black market tax" on beach bars that offered poker, blackjack and craps games.

"Gambling has always been a way of life down here," said Rip Poulos, 71, a local poker pro who once ran 37 dice games from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula. "People here just grew into it."

That ended in the late 1960s, when the feds drove gambling underground after crackdowns sparked by complaints from nearby Keesler Air Force Base, whose recruits were regularly clipped in rigged games.

Legal, dockside casinos landed in Mississippi in 1992, transforming a fading beach resort into a kind of Bubba Vegas. Poker rooms thrived for a while, luring the tail end of an older generation raised on all-night kitchen-table games.

The Travel Channel aired weekly tournaments from exotic locations, other networks followed suit - and a phenomenon was born.

"Until a couple years ago, we spent a long time trying to cultivate new players," said Mike Smith, who runs the poker room at the Biloxi Grand Casino. "Then TV and the Internet did it for us."