Poker has always been America's game, but poker is changing these days. In a big way. Ask a friend or neighbor with only a casual knowledge of the game to offer an image of poker, and one of three pictures is likely to appear:
Poker is a game played by Mississippi riverboat gamblers with pencil-thin moustaches, fast hands, and a derringer hidden up their ruffled sleeves, or it's played by gunfighters of the Old West (men like Doc Holliday, Wild Bill Hickok, and Bat Masterson). Welcome to Dodge City, pardner. Check your guns at the marshal's office and pull up a chair.
Another picture of poker comes right out of the movie, The Sting. Imagine 1930s Chicago mobsters, a round table, a low-hanging lamp illuminating the thick cigar smoke rising from the ash tray, guys with shoulder holsters and snub-nosed 38s, a bottle of cheap Scotch on the table, and someone the size of an NFL linebacker stationed by the peep-hole at the door.
There's a kinder, gentler version too. This is a picture of Uncle Jack and Aunt Gertie playing poker around the kitchen table for pennies, and somehow all the nieces and nephews always come away winners.
Poker has been all of these things, and more. Although your authors are far too young to have gambled with Doc Holliday or played cards with Al Capone, both are familiar with the kitchen table introduction to America's national card game.
Since the late 1980s, poker has undergone a renaissance, a greening, if you please. Today's poker is clean, light, and airy, and decidedly middle class. Like bowling and billiards before it, poker has moved out from under the seedier side of its roots and is floIring in the sunshine.
No matter where you live, you probably live within a few hours drive of a public card casino. Poker is all around you. Seek and you shall find, and these days you don't have to look very far either.