Sporting News, The: Cards, cash and cool: the new American dream: for $10 million, maybe I should le

Picked up The Washington Post the other day and read a Norman Chad story saying the World Series has started. Not in St. Louis or Boston. In Las Vegas.

And now comes the grand finale, the "Main Event," where as many as 6,600 poker players will ante up more than $60 million of their own money. That's $10,000 each to buy in. The winner might push away from the green felt with $10 million.

So I called my man Chad, who is to poker what John Madden is to football, only funnier and with a mustache.

"Tell me about poker," I said.

"There's an onslaught and an avalanche," he said.

Causing me to duck under a chair.

"Especially among young people," he said.

Millions of Americans play. Chad wrote about the Vegas gathering of "poker pros, local heroes, gambling wannabes and dead-money drifters." The New York Times has hired a weekly poker columnist, James McManus, whose first published sentence was a paraphrase of Jacques Barzun's famous line on baseball: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker." The Travel Channel--the Travel Channel--covers poker.

So, a couple years ago, ESPN answered the demand by televising poker. When it needed a color commentator, the casting call went out. It went out like this: "Hey, Norm, come here."

Everyone knew Norman Chad played poker. Once upon a time, he had been a semireal sportswriter, first at The Washington Post and then writing a football-betting column for the dear departed National Sports Daily. The column, a riot of comic images, survived the National's demise and soon decorated newspapers across the land.

Meanwhile, Chad played cards before, during and after two marriages, usually in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Park Casino's poker room. "It's the room of broken lives," he said. "Out of work, divorced, you go there and see friendly faces. It's a safe harbor, 24 hours a day. I usually went two days a week 50 weeks a year."

Here, perhaps, I said, "Really?"

"I never told my friends back East. In Los Angeles, they said, 'Only twice a week? What discipline!' In Washington, D.C., they would've had an intervention."

The climactic shufflings of this World Series take place at the Rio Hotel and Casino in "a room the size of Montana," Chad said. It begins with three daily sessions, 2,200 players in each, and grinds on until nine players come to the last table. "They'll all leave millionaires," Chad said. One will win maybe $10 million, an amount usually associated with performance-enhancing drugs. The intriguing difference is poker players risk their own cash rather than Steinbrenner's.

"Like Lee Trevino said about golf," Chad said, "Pressure is a $20 Nassau when you've got $5 in your pocket."

I spent many a sunny afternoon in the smoky darkness of a pool hail in a small central Illinois town where wizened men took my pennies at euchre, gin rummy and poker. Since those days of innocence, I have played poker for money one time. It happened at a World Series (of baseball). Poker veterans invited me in. They could sit on a bed and fill an inside straight. I figured my buddy, Bill Millsaps of the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, would protect me.

We'd been at it, oh, 13 minutes when I had lost that night's dinner money. Soon, I'd lost the next morning's breakfast money. I looked at Millsaps sitting by the headboard. On his handsome face was a look of surpassing contentment. Cards were shuffled. Heartless men, dashing knights of the keyboard, arranged their cards into pairs and flushes and whatever else was necessary to rob a rube--me--of his next week's paycheck.

Meanwhile, Millsaps talked in his charmin' Virginia gentleman way. And, y'know what? I listened. As to when it dawned on me that I listened too much to the charmin' Virginia gentleman--he won, I lost--I can tell you precisely when I figured that out. Like, NOW!

I learned what Norman Chad has known forever. Poker is more than the luck of the draw. It's who's paying attention. The best players are human polygraphs. They detect changes in body temperature, breathing rhythms and pulsations in forehead veins. Those are "tells." They tell when a player has bad cards and good, unless you have made the mistake of hooking up with dudes so cool and impervious they can fake "tells."

So I asked Chad if he could spot "tells."

"If I could," he said, "I'd play five times a week."

And he sighed.