KEY POINTS:
Everyone has a poker face. Property marketer Kevin Clark's is introspective, verging on brooding. Publisher Martin Cardno's is stony, half-hidden by mirror-glasses.
TV presenter Brooke Howard-Smith talks a lot and calls his opponents "sweetheart" and "hotpants".
IT specialist Robert Wang grins and crows happily when he wins.
Their game on Thursday night at SkyCity is a friendly. But Cardno, 36, and Wang, 42, regularly play in tournaments overseas. They have an arrangement whereby one gets a percentage of the other's wins. This year, Cardno has played in 15 tournaments during eight trips and made $100,000 in winnings.
Kiwi professional players usually have to travel for the big money, but in the next four months New Zealand will host the two richest tournaments to be held here.
The first is a leg of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour at Auckland's SkyCity until next Sunday. It has an expected prize pool of $1m while the 2009 New Zealand championship, dubbed The Battle for Middle Earth, is at Christchurch Casino in January.
Buy-ins - the amount players have to put in the pot to join - are $3000 and $5000 respectively. Satellite tournaments played in casinos and pubs throughout the country give amateurs the chance to win a place at the big tournaments for free, or for under a $100 buy-in.
The coming-of-age for professional poker is the top end of a poker revival making exclamations like "I raised on the flop but there were too many overcards" normal conversation in many lounges and pubs throughout the country.
By some accounts, the international poker fever is three to five years more advanced in Australia, Europe and America, but we're catching on.
More than 750,000 Australians have played poker at least once in the previous 12 months, and about 450,000 who play poker (home game, casino, pub or club, online) at least once a week.
And 50m people in the United States play poker regularly.
There are no complete figures available here, but several thousand people play in the New Zealand Pub Poker League each week.
Lee Nelson, our resident celebrity poker professional, believes per capita our boom is well underway.
Nelson is co-commentator with Howard-Smith for the TV3 and C4 show, Celebrity Joker Poker. An affable American-born doctor now living in Nelson, his place in the poker firmament was assured in 2006 when he won the salubrious Aussie Millions, taking home $1.2 million.
He's written three poker books, including bestseller Kill Phil (apparently a surprising number of poker players are called Phil), and won about $2m in his poker career.
Nelson traces the revival to three elements: the advent of the "hold camera", which shows players' private hands on TV shows, enabling watchers to get inside the game; the online gaming explosion, allowing players to hone their skills at home at their own pace; and growing social acceptability.
Suddenly lawyers, accountants and teachers were organising social tournaments - at least one has been covertly staged on an Auckland university campus with the drinks supplied by a player who worked at a major brewery. Students were putting themselves through university with online poker winnings.
Esoteric strategies were laid out for the masses in a new how-to literature, and discussed in terrifying detail in internet forums. Extreme Poker tournaments were played on platforms 30 storeys above the ocean and in scuba gear under the ocean. Last year, 18-year-old Norwegian Annette Obrestad won a European championship, giving the game a poster-girl-next-door. Poker was no longer the sole domain of flinty cowboy-types amid smoke in back rooms.
Says Nelson, "Poker went from the back room to the front room."
The big guns playing in the New Zealand tournaments include the improbably named accountant-turned-poker pro, Chris Moneymaker (reports claim it's the name he was christened).
Moneymaker's David and Goliath ascent is legendary. Like Obrestad, he started by playing internet poker in his spare time.
In 2003, he entered an online competition for $59, and won his way up the tournament ladder to a major live event in Las Vegas, finally winning $3.8m
The adrenalin-shot this delivered to online poker has been dubbed the Moneymaker Effect.
Its products include Kiwi accountant Justin Eggleton, 25, whose poker winning helped fund his studies.
"Online poker was a great way to take my mind off law school, while also helping to get out of overdraft and give me a bit of much-needed beer money. I was also able to get on a few hot streaks during my holidays that helped pay for a couple of overseas trips."
He usually plays four to six virtual tables simultaneously (some players have upwards of 20 tables on the go at once) and has won thousands of dollars over the years.
The majority of tables have cheap buy-ins of less than $50, but some online players claim to make six-figure incomes.
According to one American forecaster, the worldwide online game market could grow from $5.1 billion in 2005 to more than $19.6b in 2011.
Of course, most players - an estimated 98 per cent - will lose money. The online juggernaut, which has brought card games to a younger generation, has raised concerns about problem gambling.
Studies suggest about one in five Australian high school students gamble on card games.
British researcher Professor Mark Griffiths has drawn attention to online gambling's fish hooks.
For most gamblers electronic, or e-cash, will be easier to part with than real cash; the internet offers unlimited access and anonymity; and free games have been shown to offer higher odds of winning than paid ones.
David Boom, of the Problem Gambling Foundation, says the online boom is part of a slew of new gambling options that is normalising gambling.
"That's feeding into hardcore problem gambling."
He says there's no compulsion for host responsibility measures on websites, let alone in people's private lounges.
But players at the Horse & Trap in Mt Eden, Auckland, on Thursday night defend the game.
One, a landscape gardener who declined to give her name, says she has friends who use poker as a substitute for other forms of gambling that got them into trouble.
Richard Maui, 33, says players can easily get a poker fix for free online, or by joining a pub league.
The call centre worker won a place in the SkyCity tournament through free pub league satellites.
This week, he could be pitted against an international champion poker player. "I'm as nervous as anything," he grins.
"But since it wasn't any money of mine, I'm quite happy.
"It's basically a roller coaster."
The poker fascination goes well beyond money. Adherents speak with something approaching reverence of the stamina and mental rigour required for poker.
"You need a renaissance personality," says Alistair Bone, a radio journalist and serious poker hobbyist.
You need maths to mentally calculate changing odds.
Players also need patience and aggression, and the instinct to know when to use each.
"Ninety per cent of top players will have a blank look, ready to change into any personality," says Bone. "They're just kind of empty."
"There's a fine line between a maniac at the poker table and a champion," says Lee Nelson.
"The difference is the champion knows when to take his foot off the accelerator, he's got a sixth sense. Whereas the maniac doesn't know when to stop."
Any given game is about 25 per cent luck, he says, but on a long-term basis luck contributes far less.
Poker's status as a sport has been questioned because of its luck element, but Nelson contends just as much luck is at play in other sports.
He also argues the stamina required for 15-hour days during the three-day main events qualifies poker as an endurance sport.
Poker has its lexicon of jargon. There are tells - giveaway mannerisms that alert other players to the strength of individual hands. Nelson outlines common beginner tells as looking at chips when dealt a strong hand and staring at the fold cards when holding a weak hand.
There are tight aggressive and loose aggressive players. Tight aggressives don't play many hands but when they do, they play them boldly and seldom bluff. Loose aggressives play many hands and are unpredictable.
Deb Merito, of Christchurch, is second on the New Zealand pub leaderboard and considers himself a slow player.
"When I've got a full house I let everybody else do the raising until it gets to the river [final card dealt] and I let them bet and then re-raise. I sucker them in."
The mother and business development manager plays four times a week.
"It's a time where you can lie, cheat, bullshit, bluff, be honest, do whatever you want and it's okay."
She likes the social aspect of pub poker. Her husband, Victor, also ranks high on the leaderboard.
"Vic's just as competitive as I am. We made a golden rule if we get on to each other's table, he's no different to the next person. We're going to take each other out."
