About a year ago, if you asked Thomas Lewis what he needed to play poker, he would have answered “a computer and a mouse.” Lewis, Lawrence junior, used to be one of those people who preferred playing poker online. However, he has recently started to grab actual cards.

According to Digital Journal, online poker has grown from an $82.7 million business in 2001 to a $2.4 billion business in 2005. Even though online poker continues to thrive, some people are returning to classic off-line poker for several reasons.

One of the biggest reasons for this reverse in trend for some people is the chance to show off their poker skills. Essential skills of poker, such as bluffing and mind reading, are unlikely to be applicable online.

Lewis says he got tired of online poker because of the disappointment he felt when he realized that his two weeks of poker study couldn’t help him win the pots. He then decided to enter a free poker tournament in Lawrence, and discovered himself winning more often.

“99 percent of the books I read assume you are playing poker at the real tables,” Lewis says. “I didn’t realize the difference from online poker at that time.”

Going to free tournaments became Lewis’s hobby and he and his friends usually go every Thursday and Saturday. Although he and his buddies don’t play poker to gamble, he discovered the adrenaline rush of acting when he faced the opponents.

“You can actually feel your heartbeat increasing when you face your opponents in real life,” Lewis says.

Poker Pub, an entertainment company founded in Lawrence in 2004, has been providing free poker tournaments in Lawrence twice a day every week except Fridays. Followed by rapid growth, Poker Pub now hosts free Texas Hold’em tournaments in more than 15 cities including Topeka, Austin, Texas, Denver, and St. Louis.

Melissa Nagy was a student at KU when she used to go out to free tournaments to have a couple of drinks and get better at poker. She is now a manager of Poker Pub in Lawrence.

“It’s a great place to meet people, learn or perfect the game of poker and have fun,” Nagy says.

Social atmosphere is another major reason people go out to play poker. Nagy says people participating in the free tournaments can be more social than others playing for money.

The graphics of online poker games are impressive—they even try to catch the smallest details like a characters’ facial expression—but are still not comparable to a real poker environment. Online characters don’t scream or even kick over a chair like Phil Hellmuth did in the World Series of Poker. The facial expressions of winners and losers, all kinds of ridiculous sunglasses and hats, and that rattling sound people make with their chips are scenes you can only see from real poker tables.

Luis Marquez, dealer at the Harrah’s casino, says certain people like to come out to play poker because of poker chips. He says the pleasant feeling people get from touching poker chips encourages them to come out from behind their computer screens.

“It’s like touching the real money,” Marquez says. “You can’t get this kind of feeling when you see chips online.”

Peter Steiner, author of Thursday night poker: how to understand, enjoy and win, says a lot of people tend to enjoy the excitement and the privileges poker brings to them. According to his book, people enjoy the “release of aggressions through the legitimatized use of hostile and self-serving behavior that may be frowned upon in everyday pursuits.” This is one of the reasons poker has become popular entertainment between friends beyond the gambling aspect, Steiner says.

Still, online poker remains the vehicle through which most of us play poker nowadays. The easy accessibility of online poker and the chance to practice poker skills for free is still appealing for poker-lovers. Online poker is usually more fast-paced, and also offers different types of poker games other than Texas Hold’em. So let your computer rest once in a while, grab a deck of cards and chips and play with your friends. It’s always nice to play a game the way it was meant to be played.