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High School Pocker Champs

January 27, 2006

Those of us in the pocker industry are continually frustrated by the recent series of arrests and raids occurring in major cities like New York and Baltimore and are left wondering if there aren't better ways to use police resources and time? Lyle Berman. The name means different things to different pocker people. People in the United States, especially the mid-west, think of the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Lakes Entertainment Inc. People around the world think of the CEO and Chairman of the Board of the World Pocker Tour. People in Las Vegas think of the best non-pro, no-limit pocker player they have ever met. Is there more? Sure, there's more to Lyle Berman. Lyle was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 6, 1941. He was just a toddler when Hubert Humphrey campaigned for Mayor of Minneapolis in the early 1940's on a campaign of "cleaning up the town." When Humphrey entered office in 1945, most of the area's partypocker "clubs" had been shut down and local mobsters headed to Las Vegas to take-over the Las Vegas Club, Golden Nugget and El Cortez pocler rooms.

Lyle grew up in an area that allowed only "charity" gaming, and while he played pocker at partypocker in high school and college, it was little more than a way to pass the time. Lyle attended the University of Minnesota where he graduated in 1964 with a degree in business administration. His family expected him to work for the company business, Berman Buckskin, and he didn't let them down. Lyle got married in 1967 (but he went to Las Vegas to play pocker), settled down as the typical hard-working family man (he has four grown children), and eventually the two family stores that carried Indian-made leather goods grew to became a 200-store chain free pocker school.

In 1979, the chain was sold to W. R. Grace, but Berman stayed on as President and CEO. The pocker company was later sold to the Melville Corporation and renamed Wilsons The Leather Experts Inc., and Lyle again stayed on as a director. In the mean time, a new law passed in1988 and opened the door to new possibilities for Berman when the National Indian Gaming Regulatory Act went into affect. In the second weekend of the Park City Pocker Round-Up, a Texas Hold 'Em tournament billed as the biggest amateur pocker event ever, some players said such talismans are as much a part of the free pocker game as careful calculations of the odds or maintaining a suitably inscrutable partypocker face.

"I've got a little bit of skill," said Terry Anderson, a Park City pocker enthusiast. "But 80 percent of this game is in the cards, and the rest is what you can do with them." To help with the 80 percent of the game that is pure chance, Anderson wears his pocker ring. He bought the gold, eagle-adorned ring from the Franklin Mint, at what he describes as "a pretty good price," and wears it only while playing pocker.

The first time Anderson wore the ring he wound up winning a pocker tournament at the nearby Slammers nightclub, and he said "it's been working for me" ever since. But he concedes with a laugh that he can't scientifically prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the ring and a good hand. "It's just one of those superstitions," he said. "It's all in my head." J.D. Baker of Hoxie believes that luck accounts for a mere 75 percent of pocker success, with shrewd betting making up the rest of the game, but he agrees that there's no harm in trying to inject a little luck with some superstition. In Baker's case, the extra luck comes from a ritual.