Traditionally America's game, poker is fast becoming a world game. Like baseball and basketball, it's now a worldwide phenomenon. You're as likely to find a game in Australia, Vienna, or London as you are in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or Atlantic City.

Even so, poker still conjures up colorful images of the old American frontier you remember from TV and the movies. When you think about poker, it's an easy mind's eye leap to the game played by TV gunfighters in saloons of the Old West - men like Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday - and a generation of quick-witted and quick-handed Mississippi riverboat gamblers with pencil-thin moustaches and derringers hidden in their ruffled sleeves.

Another nostalgic trail, this time through film, leads to scenes of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting: A low-hanging table lamp illuminates cigar smoke rising from ashtrays as a bunch of circa-1930's Chicago mobsters sit around a green felt table sharing smokes, jokes, and a bottle of bootlegged hootch. Cards are in the air and the stakes are high; fortunes hang on the turn of a card. If the deck turns cold, staring down an outrageous bluff - eyeball to eyeball in true movie machismo fashion - may be the surest road to glory.

Westerns and gangster flicks need poker scenes like you'd need an ace up your sleeve in such games. They're part of the mystique and the myth fueling thousands of Thursday night poker games held in homes, hotel rooms, and country clubs all across America.