DOYLE BRUNSON (above, left) is a poker legend. Twice winner of the game's most prestigious annual tournament, the World Series of Poker (WSOP), held in Las Vegas, the cowboy-hat-clad southerner affectionately known as Texas Dolly also wrote what many consider to be the bible of poker theory, “Super System: A Course in Power Poker”. His reputation among card-shufflers borders on the superhuman. Indeed, after fighting off supposedly terminal cancer in the 1960s, he celebrated his return to the cardrooms with 53 straight wins. Adding to the mystique, both of his World Series titles were won with exactly the same cards: a full house of tens over twos.

Now in his mid-70s, Mr Brunson is still going strong. But not strong enough for Annette Obrestad (above, right), who beat the old master and 361 other entrants in September to win the first ever WSOP event held outside America. Miss Obrestad's victory, which netted her £1m ($2m), shows how much poker has changed since the days when Texas Dolly, Amarillo Slim Preston and Jack “Treetops” Straus held sway. She is only 19 (making her the youngest ever winner of a World Series bracelet) and she is, of course, a woman. She hails from Norway, not Nevada. And though she had previously won over $800,000 in internet tournaments, the event at London's Empire Casino was the first time she had encountered serious opposition in the flesh. The poker press refers to her by her online moniker, annette_15.

Miss Obrestad's route to the grand prize—dumped on the final table in bundles of $50 notes, as is the World Series tradition—required her to see off such modern-day poker luminaries as Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, a hirsute scholar of game theory, Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott, a somewhat less cerebral but wily British professional who wears diamond-encrusted knuckledusters, and Phil “Poker Brat” Hellmuth, arguably the most celebrated (not least by himself) modern player. Jim McManus, a poker player and historian, describes the young Scandinavian's win as a “startling milestone”.

Yet it is also part of a trend. Youngsters are flocking to poker as never before, attracted by its growing cachet and the ever-expanding pots. The plethora of books, blogs and DVDs now easily accessible, and the rapid growth of poker online, means newcomers can learn the art much more quickly than in earlier eras. “When I started out it took years of hard grind at the table to get good. Now the learning curve is much steeper,” says Howard “The Professor” Lederer, a professional player. It is often said that while Texas Hold 'Em, the most popular version of poker, may take only minutes to learn, it takes a lifetime to master. Annette_15 may beg to differ.

The threat to the old guard from quick-learning online players first became apparent in 2003, when the aptly named Chris Moneymaker won the World Series after qualifying through a satellite tournament for players on a poker website. He turned his $40 fee (a tiny fraction of the $10,000 “buy-in” for the pros) into $2.5m, finishing off his final opponent with a colossal bluff. This year's winner in Vegas, Jerry Yang, qualified the same way. After two weeks of intense play, with daily sessions lasting up to 16 hours, the 39-year-old psychologist went home $8.25m richer, promising to give much of it to charity. No other sporting competition (if poker can be called a sport) offers the same reward.

Popular websites such as Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars enjoy peak traffic of tens of thousands of visitors at any given time, occasionally over 100,000. Full Tilt offers visitors the chance to try their wits against a roster of professionals, who play under their own names and are paid according to how well known they are. Poker sites employ some of the snazziest software on the web. They also offer a dizzying array of blogs and forums, which debate everything from “slowplaying” (playing a strong hand with deceptive passivity) to Morton's Theorem (don't ask). One recent discussion had more than 1,600 participants. No wonder it is often said that poker has done more than anything apart from pornography to develop the web.

Star of the small screen

The other force fuelling poker's growth is television. The game has grown rapidly on the small screen since camera crews worked out a way to show the “hole cards” (those dealt face down to each player) using miniature cameras positioned beneath specially designed tables with glass panels. This allowed viewers to see each hand's dynamics as they unfolded. Televised celebrity games have added to poker's appeal. Ben Affleck, Toby Maguire and James Woods are among those who consider themselves accomplished amateurs. Mr Affleck even hired a pro to help him raise his game, and subsequently won California's state poker tournament.

Today poker is the third most watched sport on cable television in the United States, after car racing and American football, trumping even NBA basketball. In America, it is regularly aired on ESPN and the Travel Channel, while Britain has its own poker channel. ESPN's World Series shows regularly get more than 1m viewers, and numbers hold up well even during the busiest sports periods, such as during the major-league baseball play-offs and the NASCAR motorsports season.

AP

The poker economy has never been flusher. There are an estimated 60m-80m regular players in America and perhaps 80m-100m elsewhere. Poker is by far the largest chunk of the online gambling market, which had worldwide revenues of around $15 billion in 2006—a figure that may be closer to $20 billion this year. Poker chips are among the best-selling items on Amazon.com. What was once the preserve of either high-rollers or low-lifes is now being roundly embraced by the mass of ordinary folk in between.

The changing of the guard at the top of poker reflects this move into the mainstream. Harrah's, the casino operator that runs the WSOP, has brought in Jeffrey Pollack, a former NASCAR executive, to smooth its image and entice in corporate money. He has revamped the website, wrung more money out of ESPN and put poker on the radio (where it works surprisingly well). More impressively, he has lured dozens of sponsors—including Hershey's chocolate, Milwaukee's Best Light beer and Planters peanuts (“the nuts” being the term for an unbeatable hand of cards)—into a game that many consider morally questionable.

Mr Pollack says his aim is to run the WSOP, which was conceived in the late 1960s, as a “38-year-old start-up”, constantly innovating and pushing into less developed markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. An annual tournament in Macau is likely to be the next move. That would put the World Series head to head with the new Asia Pacific Poker Tour, which is sponsored by the PokerStars website. In some Asian countries, such as Thailand, poker is illegal. But China is a potentially huge market, and the game has exploded in popularity in Australia. Some 400,000 Australians joined poker leagues after Joe Hachem, from Melbourne, won the World Series in 2005. That burst of activity prompted a government inquiry.

Another largely untapped market is women. They make up only around one in 20 of all tournament entrants, though Miss Obrestad's victory is likely to encourage more to take the plunge. Mr McManus, who teaches a poker course at a Chicago college, says his female students have just as much of a feel for the game as his male ones. But he also thinks men have the edge in no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, which relies more heavily than other forms of poker on aggression and the willingness to risk everything on a single hand.

Some of the game's most eloquent player-commentators are women, notably Annie Duke, who has won more than $3m in prize money, and Victoria Coren, winner of the London leg of last year's European Poker Tour and author of a poker column in Britain's Guardian. Ms Coren describes poker as “a stimulating psychological challenge, combining guts and detective work...a world of its own, offering all the childish appeal of secret places, special languages and staying up late at night.” It is hard to imagine Mr “Devilfish” Ulliott describing it that way.

Both would agree, however, that the best players display a good deal of skill, and that poker is a long way from basic forms of gambling such as roulette or lotteries. The object, says Ms Coren, is to control the swings of luck with skill, figuring out how to win the maximum with your luckiest hands and lose the minimum with your unluckiest ones.

The skill-versus-luck debate has crackled back to life because of the passage of a law last year, sneakily tacked on to a port-security bill, which sought to bolster existing legislation against internet wagering by blocking Americans' access to accounts that can be used to gamble online. All games that are “predominantly” subject to chance were covered by the ban. Poker was included. For reasons best explained by lobbyists, horse racing, fantasy sports and lotteries were exempted. This discrepancy had already landed America in hot water at the World Trade Organisation, thanks to a case brought by tiny Antigua, home to several online gambling sites.

America's Department of Labour has given a nod to the element of skill, in some eyes, by last year recognising “professional poker player” as an official occupation. Courts, however, tend to view poker as a game of chance. That, Mr Lederer is convinced, is only because the opposing arguments have been botched at the bench.

As he concedes, it is hard to argue that a seasoned professional will beat a first-timer in any given hand. But there is evidence aplenty that, over the long run, a player with a head for calculating odds and a feel for the psychology of the game, such as bluffing, will always overcome an untalented opponent.

The skill, Mr Lederer argues, is in the betting. And it is apparent in the fact that you can win without the best hand. More than half of all hands end without the cards being shown, not because one player got lucky but because he managed to persuade the others, given their analysis of the available information and the size of the pot, that it was sensible to fold. When no one declares their hand, can it really be argued that the outcome was determined by luck?

At the highest level, decisions about betting, bluffing and folding are based on the complex juggling of probabilities. “What drew me to poker is that it is essentially an academic endeavour,” says Ms Duke. She is one of a growing group of full-time players who came to poker through game theory and mathematics, not through any love of a flutter. (Indeed, she never plays craps or roulette.) Others include Mr Lederer (her brother) and Mr Ferguson, who has a doctorate in computer science and writes academic papers on probability theory with his father, a statistician at UCLA.

Thomas Bihl, winner of a recent HORSE tournament, in which players have to show mastery of five different styles of poker, thinks the game has more in common with finance than it does with basic forms of gambling, because it requires the constant pricing and repricing of risk. Mr Bihl, a former stock trader, says the move from his old job into poker was a natural progression. Though his £71,000 win was “a huge lift”, he says that he is motivated not by money but by the chance to use his brain to outfox opponents. This is a common refrain among regular players. As Ms Coren put it in a recent article: “Cash is nothing more than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an angler. The game is all about money, and nothing to do with money.”

Those who think skill predominates also point to the fact that some players excel at the game while others don't. Dan Harrington made the final table of the WSOP in both 2003 and 2004, the odds of which would be 25,000 to one if it were down to chance. Stu “The Kid” Ungar, a brilliant player with a self-destructive streak, won three times in not many more attempts before succumbing to drugs.

Moreover, when wealthy amateurs pit their wits against professional players steeped in poker theory, more often than not they lose their shirts. In a number of sessions beginning in 2001, Andy Beal, a Dallas-based banker, locked horns with a syndicate of pros, including Mr Lederer, convinced that he could come out on top. He did not.

After two weeks of poker, with daily sessions lasting up to 16 hours, Jerry Yang, a psychologist, went home $8.25m richer

Nevertheless, luck is important. It blends with skill to produce a game that is “much like life, full of incomplete information and second-guessing,” says Mr Lederer. Poker is certainly more exciting to most than chess, a game of complete information and limited psychology where the better player always wins. Tellingly, whereas computers can be programmed to play chess at the highest level, they still have a long way to go to match expert players in poker games with more than two participants. The best attempt so far, Polaris, developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, failed to get the better of two top players, Ali Eslami and Phil “Unabomber” Laak (who plays hooded).

Moreover, professionals say that poker's generous dollop of luck is good for them on balance, because it attracts money from neophytes who fancy their chances of beating the top players in tournaments. Some pros disparagingly call such players “ATMs”. But, as Mr Moneymaker showed, the newcomers occasionally win big. His victory in 2003 led to a surge in entrants for the World Series main event from 512 in 2000 to 8,773 in 2006. A dip this year to 6,358 reflected the new American law's effective ban on internet sites buying satellite-competition winners into the tournament. (Some tried to get around this by sending the winners cheques instead, but most recipients simply held on to the money rather than using it to buy themselves in.)

“It doesn't take most young people long to realise they won't be the next Michael Jordan. But they can all aspire to be the next Phil Hellmuth, and they don't even have to work out,” says Mr Hellmuth, slurping a full-cream mocha. He then quickly points out that poker requires a great deal of mental stamina, and that he promotes an energy drink.

Poker for pupils

Parents are increasingly encouraging their children to play, he adds, because it is mentally more rewarding than video games and does not mix well with alcohol (at least if you care about winning). “When I started it was seen as a bit of an outlaw pastime, for rogues and cheats. Now it's a huge bottom-up movement,” he says.

It might seem a bit of a leap to go from here to putting poker on the curriculum. But some academics see it as a worthy subject of study. Chief among them is Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. Earlier this year he founded the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS), whose awkward name belies a clear set of goals: to highlight poker's role in teaching patience, strategy and money management, and in improving cognitive skills. “Poker offers metaphors for a range of life skills and could be a wonderful educational tool,” says Mr Nesson, who plays a regular game with other law professors, including Alan Dershowitz—though he has yet to play with Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice known to have a fondness for poker.

Poker is, first and foremost, a game of managing resources, argues Mr Nesson, teaching a cautious approach to risk-taking, not recklessness. There is some evidence for this. One study, comparing experienced poker players with financial- market traders, found the players less likely to exhibit over-confidence.

An unlikely social-welfare tool

Determined to counter what he sees as the demonisation of poker by the American right, and the resulting squeeze on personal freedoms, Mr Nesson is working on a pilot programme to teach the game to disadvantaged children in schools in America and Jamaica. He muses about turning a property he runs in Second Life, a virtual world, into an online poker university.

AP

Bets are on at the World Series

Ms Duke sees other ways in which poker teaches “life skills”. It taught her, for instance, how to be a good loser (“Even the best lose most of the hands they play. If you let that get to you, it will kill you”). She says she even uses poker theory when dealing with her children: “I always bet the minimum when making a threat. If you say no TV rather than no Disneyland, you can always raise later.”

By enlisting the help of players, statisticians, law students and lobby groups such as the Poker Players Alliance, whose membership has swollen to 860,000, Mr Nesson hopes to roll back not only the federal ban on online gambling but also the worst bits of the nonsensical patchwork of state laws. Massachusetts law, for instance, makes it hard for the university to hold even a charity poker tournament. “Are they afraid that people will become addicted to giving money to good causes?” asks Andrew Woods, a Harvard student who helps to run the GPSTS.

As the pokeristas sharpen their legal arguments, they are hoping for some extra help from the statisticians. Online poker sites have reams of game-by-game data. These could, in theory, be used to show what makes some players better than others, and what defines their skill (Bluffing? Shrewd betting based on the rapid calculation of odds? Or both?). Though research in this area has been thin on the ground to date, number-crunchers are starting to rise to the challenge.

Among them is Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago and author of “Freakonomics”. He oversees a project called Pokernomics. It aims to collect millions of hands (which players can store using readily available tracking software) and analyse them systematically in the hope of answering questions. Does a big stack of chips allow players to bully others and win even more? To what extent does position relative to the dealer matter? Are there simple strategies that can be used to win money even with losing hands?

These efforts may produce fascinating results. Or they might reveal nothing much. Even if the data highlight strong trends, it may still not be clear which are caused by skill and which by luck, says Jay Kadane, a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies games.

AP

Poker's getting bigger

Perhaps a better way to win over judges and lawmakers would be to highlight poker's place in the American psyche. Introduced by French colonials, as a game called poque, it soon spread from its original base in the Mississippi delta. By the late 19th century it had become a prominent cultural facet across the country, not only in the South or Wild West. Much ink has been spilled analysing its appeal to Americans. The answer may lie no deeper than Walter Matthau's one-liner about poker exemplifying “the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great”.

Poker has long fascinated America's great and good, from politicians to generals to captains of industry. Presidents Roosevelt (both), Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon were all keen players. Nixon was famously good: most of the funding for his first congressional run came from poker winnings. Poker was said to have inspired cold-war tacticians. It is still a useful military motif: recall the playing cards used to represent Saddam Hussein and his most-wanted cohorts. Poker financed a sizeable chunk of Microsoft's start-up costs. Bill Gates once said he learned more about business strategy at the baize than in classrooms—though these days he apparently prefers the more stately game of bridge.

Not all famous players have made such good role models. As he partied away the declining years of his career, Errol Flynn incurred some excruciating poker losses, including, on one particularly bad night, a Caribbean island he had hoped to develop into a holiday resort. John Wayne had some shockers too, though in one memorable game he won Lassie from the canine star's desperate owner.

Getting serious

What would Nixon, Flynn and Wayne have made of poker today? They would surely have marvelled at the transformation of “the cheater's game” into a multi-billion-dollar industry, pumping out new millionaires almost daily. Even they might have been shocked at the latest season of “High Stakes Poker”, a television series in which players buy into each game for $500,000 apiece and the winner takes home more than $5m.

They might, perhaps, have been disappointed that the game had lost some of its backroom edginess. Miss Obrestad's generation are more likely to put their excess winnings into tax-free bonds than blow them betting on a single round of golf, as Mr Brunson and his Las Vegas pals used to do in their madder moments. Still, those hoping to win over poker's sceptics will find no better example than young annette_15. She is stern, sober and chillingly focused on her game. She appears to be exceptionally good at it too. Either that or amazingly lucky.