Independent, The (London): Take the money and run

I sat down to play in a poker game last weekend. It cost pounds 3,000 to enter, and the prize pool was pounds 500,000. The game was filmed for broadcast on television sports channels around the world. I wore a sponsor's shirt, representing www.ParadisePoker.com, rather like David Beckham wears Nike. How did this happen? Playing cards was supposed to be a hobby.

A love of gambling was handed down to me by my grandfather, who won a packet on Corbiere in the National and took our pocket money dealing blackjack - scraping the copper winnings into his lap when parental footsteps neared the kitchen. Tree climbing, face painting and hiding in cupboards were nothing to the childhood joy of playing "Twenty-One".

It was in the blood: I cannot share the fear that the Government's relaxation of gaming legislation will "create a nation of addicts", because the gambling instinct is born, not made.

Poker came into my life when I was 16. My brother, also bitten by our ancestors' gambling bug, played with his friends. Louche, muscular 19- year-old boys gathered round our kitchen table with bottles of Jack Daniel's and packets of Marlboro, speaking a strange language of "trips" and "bullets". What self-respecting teenage girl could resist? I thought at first it was the boys who were attracting me. But it wasn't.

This game was incredible. It combined the aggression of football with the psychological drama of chess. It demanded mathematical understanding, human observation, mental determination, acting skills, patience and instinct. I started devouring tactical books. I started losing all my pocket money. Again.

The year I left school, when everybody went to India to "find themselves", I went to Las Vegas to find poker. They seemed happy enough with my fake ID and my shaky grasp of Seven Card Stud. There I met Huck Seed, at that time the youngest-ever world champion of poker, who told me that Vegas was a boom town for young couples "where the guys play cards and the girls serve cocktails". My resolve hardened like quick-dry cement.

Throughout university, I commuted back to London on Friday nights and lost my week's living money at various "friendly" tables. I ate a lot of cold baked beans. A drawback to my game today is that I feel too sorry for people who lose; I have to keep reminding myself that I did my years at the coalface of loss and it was a vital learning curve.

A while later, I was matchmade with Kira Joliffe, a fellow journalist and (I was told) "the only other girl who plays poker like you do". Kira ran a Tuesday-night game in her flat above a shop in Notting Hill. I adored her immediately. Now there were two of us, plus a ragtail assortment of men who played there too. I joined the game as a regular, winning or losing a couple of hundred each week. The game re-located to my flat, where it still happens every Tuesday without fail. The players have married, divorced, had children, changed jobs (although I've done none of these things), but the game remains the same. So do the jokes.

I supplemented this weekly social poker with trips to the casino, although I found the card room intimidating - smoky, male-dominated and tough. This changed when I started dating a professional player named Joe "The Elegance" Beevers, a founder member of the notorious poker collective The Hendon Mob. Joe (far lovelier than his cool, ruthless image might suggest) took me to casino tournaments abroad and shady private games on the edges of London, and brushed up some of the weaknesses in my game (though I rarely admit that out loud). I made a lot of friends when I was with Joe: perhaps a "player's girlfriend" made more sense to the old gamblers than a girl who went to card rooms alone, for the hell of it.

This was the key period. It was a time, as I was crossing a personal line from inexpensive social poker into the competitive world of casino tournaments, that coincided with an international gambling revolution. It came in the form of the internet.

The first online card room I heard about was Paradise Poker. Like all the biggest ideas, it is very simple. You deposit money into an account via your credit card, and play poker for real money against real opponents from all over the world. There are no limits on time or space. Where British casinos operate to strict licensing hours and allocate poker a handful of tables at most (because the real money is in roulette and slot machines), internet poker tempted me with unlimited games running 24 hours a day. There's no dress code, no travel hassle, no security problem.

The Daily Mail has recently got into a tizzy about women playing poker online, seeing it as a terrible new vice. I see it as a breakthrough. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that women embrace live casino poker: it remains a pre-feminist world and can be difficult, not to mention expensive.

Internet poker is a different story. Some players now make their livings there, but it's friendly to the casual hobbyist. There are tournaments that cost five dollars. You don't have to take it seriously: I chose Paradise Poker for its "virtual cocktails and snacks", and its chat box for befriending fellow players. You don't have to deal with the smoke and late nights, or the anger of men whose pride has been damaged. You cannot be intimidated by hard stares, filthy language or uninvited passes. You use a "screen name", so you can pretend to be anyone you like: a professional, an idiot, a man. Needless to say, it took off like a rocket.

Hand in hand with the craze for online poker (pounds 40m is gambled daily in Britain alone) came television. The innovator was Channel 4, whose Late Night Poker did exactly what the channel was set up to do: it broke new ground and attracted new viewers.

Channel 4 inexplicably dropped that show, but into the gap rushed The Poker Million on Sky Sports, Celebrity Poker Club and World Poker Tour on Challenge TV, the forthcoming Victor Poker Cup and Pacific Poker Open, and a dozen more on cable. Our local poker scene is about to be revolutionised again by the European Poker Tour (a rival to the huge American World Poker Tour) launched by the British TV director and poker millionaire John Duthie.

EPT will see top-level televised tournaments held all over Europe and broadcast round the world. Last weekend's event was the first EPT tournament to happen in the UK, and that's where I took a shot at the pounds 500,000 prize pool. Sadly, I didn't make the final. Another dream dies, another game starts. In two weeks, the EPT hits Dublin.

It's strange to watch poker go mainstream. I feel a little like those people who bang on about how much they loved particular indie bands before they were famous. I was drawn to the anti-establishment flavour of the game, and now it's become the establishment. The misfits and crooks of the card room have been diluted by eager students and chirpy Scandinavian nine-to-fivers.

Yet I am part of the change myself, and it's been good to me. I was invited to play in Celebrity Poker Club, a televised tournament for writers, actors, entertainers and sportsmen, in which (against a surreal line-up of opponents including Steve Davis, Eric Bristow, Roger De Courcey and Tom Parker Bowles) I won the first prize of pounds 25,000 and my first proper trophy.

I used some of the money to buy into a series of major London tournaments in which I came second, 11th and fourth, winning another pounds 17,000. And now I have signed a reasonably lucrative "association" deal with Paradise Poker - justifying wearing the corporate logo to myself by the fact that it was always my favourite website and the one I'd have recommended anyway. I will tell St Peter that at least I turned down a bigger offer from a site where I didn't actually play.

People sometimes ask if I am a "professional poker player". My standard answer is that a "professional poker player" is simply an unemployed person who plays a lot of poker. We're all trying to win. Yes, generally I make a decent profit. No, I don't play "just for fun" any more. Yes, I am surprised by the unexpected journey from the kitchen table to the relentless card- room. And yes, I sometimes wonder if the life I would have had without poker might have been better - safer, softer, more traditional, with a little less heartbreak. But that is a lost universe now.