NakedPoker.com Drives Poker's Erotica Push: It Joins a Growing Number of Sites Combining Poker Action and Hot Babes

Ron Jeremy carried his towering plate of food and, just like he was at home, plopped down in a cozy chair right in front of two half-naked women who had staked a land claim to a square table not 10 minutes earlier. They wriggled to some deep-bass music pouring out of speakers hidden somewhere in the walls of the Penthouse Suite at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, which was loud enough to drown out the thunder of bowling pins crashing just behind the man known as the Hedgehog. Like the women, Jeremy was there because NakedPoker.com paid him to be there. The party was a celebration of its new website, www.NakedPoker.com, a site with perhaps the most honest name in Internet poker.



The suite is so cool that it has been featured on many travel shows about Las Vegas' hottest rooms. A Jacuzzi tub smoldered behind the dancers, bowlers wearing dress shoes tossed pink bowling balls down a real bowling alley, a DJ hunched over his turntable in the same room that a lazy pool game was being played, and beautiful people walked around serving food and drinks.



NakedPoker.com, which launched on July 7, joins a small but expanding family of a new type of online poker site, one that mashes sex and poker together into one pulsation package. Instead of brilliant middle-aged men wearing golf shirts, these sites feature topless women in high heels. Instead of tons of pages dedicated to poker strategy articles, these sites feature high-resolution galleries of hot babes in bikinis, hot babes in unbuttoned shirts, hot babes lying on poker tables, and hot babes doing what hot babes do best: look hot.



"We don't consider ourselves as part of the adult industry; we just recognize that adult males like to look at pretty females," said Michael Erstling, marketing director for NakedPoker.com. "And they also like to play poker."



The Poker Players Alliance, the grassroots organization that is working to keep online poker legal, estimates that more than 70 million Americans play poker, and about 5 million of them play online. Last year, more than $60 billion was wagered on poker sites worldwide, with close to 90 percent of that coming from players in the U.S. Online adult entertainment sites have had similar success. Top Ten Reviews, an online research site, states that last year, 72 million unique visitors visited pornographic websites, and that adult-oriented Internet sites generated $57 billion worldwide ($12 billion from the U.S.). With more than $60 billion spent on porn and poker by Americans, it's no wonder more and more poker-nudie sites are springing up.

"NakedPoker is actively trying to bridge the gap between the adult industry and the poker world," Erstling said.



Pamela Anderson and Doyle Brunson chose the day before the start of the World Series of Poker main event to announce the launch of their new venture, Pamela'sPoker. Entertainment Tonight showed up at the press conference, and Pamela wore white (and a see-through top) to her "wedding" with Doyle. The room was packed with national media who couldn't get enough of it. Pamela's site is a skin of DoylesRoom.com, and includes a massive gallery of seminude Pam photos.



Months before Anderson got into the game, supermodel and publicity hawk Cindy Margolis launched her own poker site. Playboy magazine is about to get into the game with a Playboy-branded site (they're already working with NakedPoker.com, providing Playmates, but that will soon change). Hustler has an online poker room and casino, but it reflects the elegance of the brick-and-mortar Hustler Casino in California, and features hardly any women. BombShellPoker.com features a team of absolutely gorgeous women who are touted as: "Models by day, poker players by night. Besides being extremely easy on the eyes, our Bombshells are professionally trained poker players."



As if that really matters, because each girl has her own gallery, and they are wearing hardly any clothes in any of the photos, so what else is there to say about that?



In the Consumer's Hands

NakedPoker.com is going to be the site to watch, just to see how far players want to go with mixing sex and poker. Since it's brand-new, the direction the site takes and how it will change and evolve will be determined by its current users. Right now, the site leans toward the soft-core side, what Erstling calls "tasteful." The site's still loaded with women. The welcome page features 14 itself, but they are positioned in ways in which all of the erotic body parts are covered. Not one nipple can be found on the site, but this will probably change, because NakedPoker.com will take on the shape that its players want it to take. Every so often, NakedPoker.com sends a questionnaire to its customer base, and if the players want to see absolutely naked women, there's space to write that down. If enough real-money players want something, that's how it's going to be. Every NakedPoker.com player who returns a survey receives an extra $10 in his account.



A new version of its software is scheduled to be released in October. The new version will feature sexier female poker avatars, the option to switch nudity on and off, and other options that some guys wish to have in their real lives. For example, a player will be able to change the size of the dealer's breasts. The software originally launched doesn't allow that. In the current version, the dealer simply sits there, naked, and her virtual breasts are not extremely big. And the player avatars that surround her are all clothed, but this will change when the new software is released.



Despite the fun software offered at NakedPoker.com, Erstling wants to make sure that people know the site is not all about T&A.



"It's a poker site first. It's meant to be a poker site where players can enjoy beautiful women while playing poker," he said.



And it's also where men can play poker to meet beautiful women. Hooking up players with beautiful women is a cornerstone of NakedPoker.com's promotional package. While other sites offer hats and poker-strategy books for their player points, NakedPoker.com players can win trips to the Player Appreciation party that's going to be held at Hedonism Resort in Jamaica. The trip promises beautiful naked women, and players qualify by racking up as many player points as possible.

NakedPoker.com's big sign-up promotion promises new members a chance to go on a date with Stephanie Larimore, who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month in June. The 34C-24-34 brunette beauty from Fort Wayne, Indiana, lists eye contact, good manners, intelligence, confidence, and nice abs among her turn-ons, and arrogance, materialism, smoking, spitting, and bad hygiene as turnoffs. People who sign up for the site for real-money play are automatically entered into weekly freerolls to win a date with the stunning Larimore.



The site doesn't stop there, though. Erstling said that players can even request dates with famous women, and that NakedPoker.com will do its best to make it work. It even tried to hook up one of its players with Jessica Simpson, but her $2 million asking price was out of the question.



But as Erstling said, it's a real poker site, and it's currently offering a great deal for those who always wanted to try their hand in a big buy-in event. A freeroll will be held for all players who deposit $500 or more by Oct. 1. For every 100 players in the freeroll, a $1,500 World Poker Tour voucher will be given away. Players can use the voucher at any WPT event of their choice, as long as they give NakedPoker.com at least 30 days' notice.



"We're saying to people, just come on by and play, and the odds of winning a seat in a tournament are so much greater than at the other sites," Erstling said. "If you play, you're going to Jamaica; you're going to go to Las Vegas."



The History of Men
Dr. Tom Reichert has made a living talking and writing about the use of sexuality in marketing and advertising. He currently teaches advertising courses at the University of Georgia, is the author of The Erotic History of Advertising, and co-edited two others: Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal and Sex in Consumer Culture: The Erotic Content of Media and Marketing.

Reichert, who speaks with a slight Southern drawl and takes obvious joy in his work, took a professional look at NakedPoker.com and some of the other nudie-poker sites, and shared some of his opinions about this new type of marketing strategy by poker companies. He stated there's a parallel between browsing for pornography and playing online poker that makes these sites seem natural to many people, and he noted several similarities. The audience for both erotica and poker is primarily male, both activities could result in an emotionally arousing experience, and both activities are usually done while sitting alone at a computer, and both activities generate a similar type of reaction.



"To me, it's similar to the millions of men who search for online pornography. In a sense, it's risky, it's arousing, it's pleasurable," Reichert said. "I think it was just a matter of time (that these sites would be formed), considering the audience of mostly males. I think there's a lot of overlap between the two."



Although he admits that he's no expert on the ways and psychology of poker players, he has spent his professional life trying to understand how men's brains go through the day surrounded by the sexual imagery that's produced by marketing firms everywhere. This has been going on since the first days of modern American advertising, which started back in the 1880s, when more products were being mass produced and means of printing became easier. He said companies used to give men "a little something extra" by including sexually suggestive images of women in their campaigns.



For example, a cigarette company used to include trading cards of "Women of the Stage" with its cigarettes, which helped the brand become one of the top sellers. And he's found examples of advertising that featured totally naked women from as far back as the 1930s. The products were used in factories, where basically only men worked, so women didn't know what their husbands were looking at. The pictures of women were used to sell everything from industrial tubing to varnish. There's no great scientific epiphany as to why images of women work in selling a product, Reichert said.



"Woman are part of the male conversation. That's what guys primarily talk about," he said.



He also believes that there are a few general reasons that erotic poker sites have a good chance of succeeding, despite the increasingly crowded poker site market. First, NakedPoker.com (and the rest of them) is working hard to try to carve out a niche that will attract a certain type of user. In the case of NakedPoker.com, that type of user is still being defined. Reichert noted that Maxim and FHM magazines also had to find their marketplace niches when they first came out. It turned out that featuring half-naked near-celebrities propelled the sales of those magazines into the stratosphere, and now they are two of the best-selling glossies out there.



"It's kind of like carving out your space," Reichert said.



There's also the chance that users will be conditioned to always associate sex and poker with each other. Combine the two, and the two might be combined forever.



"You get this pairing of gorgeous, scantily clad women with the gambling experience. Over time, thoughts of one tend to evoke thoughts of the other," Reichert said. "It's almost like Pavlov's dog on steroids."



Every time Pavlov's dogs heard a bell ring, their mouths started to water because they thought they were going to get fed. They began to associate the bell to dinnertime. There's a chance that this might happen to players who get into the habit of using these poker sites.



When players open up NakedPoker.com's software, they're greeted by a cool, funky guitar riff that sounds like it was pulled from one of the first films Ron Jeremy starred in. Over time, if NakedPoker.com succeeds in giving its users what they want – whether that's more "tasteful" pictures of beautiful women or the hard-core videos they may ask for – this riff may cause an unconscious physical response in its players. But, the riff probably won't cause mouths to water. It will be more like a silent standing ovation beneath desks all across the country. Poker erotica, indeed.