Russ Hamilton and some Los Angeles friends are betting that TV will do the same thing for blackjack that it did for poker, and make them a tall stack of chips in the process.
Gambling pro Hamilton is the front man for “The Ultimate Blackjack Tour,” a reality-style elimination tourney picked up by CBS Sports, which will air the program at 11 a.m. Saturdays, starting on Sept. 16.
Over the past few years, telecasts of tours and tourneys have provided poker with unprecedented popularity and made it a marketable commodity, to the delight of casinos, the entertainment industry and online gaming concerns.
“There are way more blackjack players in this country than poker players, but until now you just couldn’t make the game interesting for TV,” Hamilton said.
The 57-year-old, who won the World Series of Poker in 1994, has been a gambler for most of his life and thinks the odds are in his favor. His partners in the privately owned, Century City-based Ultimate Blackjack Tour LLC entertainment attorney Jon Moonves, the brother of CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves, former MTV executive Houston Curtis and Chief Marketing Officer Larry Kopald agree. The group, along with some of their business, entertainment and poker cohorts, pooled millions of dollars to fund and film the first season.
“Television has made the Poker World Series, not the other way around,” said Sandy Millar, a tax attorney who is UBT’s chief operating officer and general counsel. “People are playing in that game because they want to be stars.”
Millar and Hamilton are keeping their cards close to the vest in terms of the number of investors (“more than 10 and less than 100”) and the amount raised to bankroll the show’s to-be-determined run.
“It’s all been a friends and family endeavor,” Millar said. “We can fund the tour for as long as we have to we’re not at all cash strapped, and we won’t have to go back and ask for more funding. We knew going into this that we would be into season two before we had season one locked up.”
Hamilton said he hopes UBT will eventually become a publicly traded entity, though Millar said it was too early to establish a timeline.
“We’re going to go through this season and look at ways to most easily and profitably benefit our investors,” Millar said. “There’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t do a public option.”
Showing the cards
“The World Series of Blackjack,” a 13-episode series in which players compete for $1 million, currently airs on GSN, formerly known as the Game Show Network. The cable channel can deliver only a fraction of the audience a broadcast network can, however, and Hamilton says its appeal is limited because the audience isn’t dealt in on the action.
“We had to come up with specifics to make our format TV-friendly,” he said. “It’s no limit and we show the hole cards because that is what the public likes.”
In blackjack, players typically compete against the dealer, not each other. They are dealt two cards, then draw more cards hoping their total is greater than the dealer’s total without going over 21, or “busting.” Poker has more nuances and betting, but Hamilton thinks blackjack’s accessibility will work in its favor.
“The game moves faster than poker. The hands are quick and people understand the game because it’s simple, even if you don’t gamble,” he said.
On the show, seven players at a table will play 30 hands. The players with the fewest chips after the eighth, sixteenth and twenty-fifth hands will be eliminated, and those remaining will play the last five to see who can accumulate the most for the victory. There also will be “secret bets,” in which players can make individual side wagers.
Because the $1.2 million in total prize money is generated by the contestant buy-ins $2,500 for the entry fee and $10,000 for the finals the tour is using the investment capital for TV production, intellectual property pursuits, marketing and licensing strategies. Aside from paying casino dealers for their time costs that range from $25,000 to $100,000 there isn’t much overhead. Eight Las Vegas casinos have signed on for the 18-episode season two of the tour, with another 10 coming onboard in the next month.
The circuit is also counting on the appeal of its contestants. The show has 13 contract players, known as Team UBT, who signed five-year deals to play on the tour. The team includes professional poker players Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, actress and 2005 Ladies World Series of Poker winner Jennifer Tilly and her boyfriend, poker pro Phil Laak.
UBT began play for the first season’s shows last September with 100 competitors and ended with a final round of seven players competing for the $300,000 winner’s take. That’s small potatoes compared to the poker series pots, where the biggest winner took home $7.5 million last year, but Hamilton said the prize money would grow as exposure and popularity increases. To help drive that growth, UBT is launching a free companion Web site that allows fans and online players to play virtual blackjack to win seats on the tour.
“Card players play gin, Chinese poker, all variations,” Hamilton said. “This is just another card game and they will all want to play.”
UBT investor Kasey Thompson, a professional poker player, businessman and longtime friend of Hamilton, is sold on the idea.
“I think blackjack will eclipse poker in popularity, especially since this is on CBS, and there are so many more players,” said Thompson. He and Hamilton have made $10,000 wagers on playground bets and Thompson dropped $700,000 to his friend in a recent golf game.
“We’ll bet on anything,” Thompson said. “I’ve taken him on some, and he’s taken me on some. It’s fun.”
