It’s on the Travel Channel almost every day.
You can practice it on TLC’s web site when you’re really, really bored.
The average jackpot in tournaments has grown tenfold in as many years, just due to the increase in popularity.
What is it? Well, it’s Texas Hold’em, of course. Perhaps the most fun of poker games (mainly because it’s more a community game than a looking-at-your-cards-and-weeping style game), Hold’em is pretty addictive when you’re actually playing. Like most games, it has its own lingo and the stats folks get a kick out of computing the odds of each hand, but it’s really not all that hard to learn.
Last weekend, Laura and I went to our friends Amanda and Jim’s house to play poker. (For background info, Jim is a numbers guy and loves to play for money, so we made him dumb it down for us and use fake cash, a.k.a. poker chips, instead!) It was such a blast and so addictive that I had to go out the next day and get a poker chip set of my own. And, in typical style, it’s not any ordinary poker chip set. Nay, this set comes in an aircraft-grade aluminum case lined with black padding and an eggshell lid. The chips are all 11.5g clay composite chips, which means absolutely nothing to me except that they feel cool and weigh 21 pounds in the case. Plus, I now have another excuse to have people over, which makes me happy.