The Bellagio tournament's field of 111 players, each of whom has put up $25,000 or won a seat via satellite tournaments or previous World Poker Tour events, has been winnowed down to six card sharks competing for a first prize of $1,011,886 in this season finale. Right now the flinty-eyed guys with stacks of hundreds and mad chip-riffling skills are not the only ones staking big money on the game. Poker is being mainstreamed into the same culture that loves NASCAR, "Survivor" and the U.S. It's clear that a seismic shift is taking place. Factor in that major publishers have recently released books by poker greats Phil Helmuth and Amarillo Slim. Now, however, poker tournaments are airing each week on cable TV, via the Travel Channel's "World Poker Tour," scheduled in prime time and generating talk around office watercoolers. The event gains resonance when you consider that, until the last 10 or so years, poker was viewed largely as a backroom enterprise, and the outside world regarded its high-stakes practitioners as being more than a little bit sketchy. Take into account, however, that the game at the Las Vegas hotel-casino is being played on a hard-angled soundstage, backdropped by a set worthy of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," and will be seen by an estimated 5 million television viewers, and it starts to become something else altogether. Even that it's a tournament with a $25,000 buy-in-the highest in history-won't stop the presses. That a poker game is poised to start at the Bellagio is not exactly news.
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