TEXAS HOLDEM ONLINE POKER

Once relegated to smoky back rooms and cramped basements, poker has hit the big time. Online, on TV and in casinos nationwide, millions of people who never knew a straight from a flush are feeling the pain of getting beat on the river.

And these days you don’t even have to play Texas Holdem poker to get caught up in the frenzy.

“What’s happened is it’s become a spectator sport,” says Craig Ghelfi, chief operating officer of Greektown Casino. “You can almost play along and sense the tension of trying to bluff or drawing that last card.”

Greektown’s poker room, which Ghelfi put in about two years ago and is still the only one in Detroit, has a full house most weeknights and 24 hours a day on weekends. The casino recently took rows of slot machines out of the room next door and put in eight more poker tables.

Greektown can now simultaneously offer many poker variants at the same time, from low-stakes versions of Seven Card Stud and Omaha High to the as-seen-on-TV game that’s most in demand: No-Limit Texas Hold ’em. Men, women, retirees and college students all lineup for the casino’s only game pitting players against each other rather than the house.

Even before lunchtime, dozens of players stream into the newly expanded poker room, which now has a nonsmoking side, a large skylight and plenty of space between the tables for crowds to watch.

“Before they opened up the new room, even at this time in the morning, there was a three- to four-hour wait to get on a table,” says Sean Romanuk, a 34-year-old teacher from Dearborn who visits several times a week and plays nothing but poker.

“When it was all slot machines, this room sat empty most of the time,” says Romanuk.

Leading to the game’s rebirth are the ever-growing number of televised tournaments and Internet  Texas Holdem poker rooms.

ESPN’s wildly popular (and endlessly rerun) coverage of the annual “World Series of Poker” held in Las Vegas has spawned “Late Night Poker” on Fox Sports Net and Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown.” The Travel Channel’s “World Poker Tour,” now in its second season, is the highest-rated show in the channel’s history. TV tried broadcasting poker games in the past, but the shows didn’t catch on until viewers could see players’ hands through lipstick cameras embedded in the tables.

Without leaving home or having to round up a group of friends, poker fanatics can jump into any of the countless Internet poker rooms and play for fun or with real money. The site www.PrimaPoker. com says the number of people playing online is growing 15 percent every month. Many online players are novices, afraid of being humiliated to join a game in person until they learn the game anonymously on the Internet.

“It’s very daunting to come into a casino,” says Tamar Yaniv, chief marketing officer of PrimaPoker.com, the largest online network. “Online you’re equal to everyone else at the table. Everyone looks the same, feels the same.”

Not that everyone online is just learning. Virtual poker rooms host plenty of cut-throat tournaments, some of which send the winners to play in the World Series of Poker, which begins May 22 at Harrah’s Las Vegas. PrimaPoker.com is sending 16 players to the world series, and for most of them it will be their first offline tournament.

Last year’s world series champ was Chris Moneymaker, an aptly named amateur who turned the $40 he paid to join an online play-in tournament into $2.5 million. Only three years after learning how to play Texas Holdem, the 27-year-old Tennessee accountant became a hero to fellow rookies by defeating lifelong players with a few lucky hands.

“Texas Holdem Poker’s really the only sport where you can play the equivalent of Tiger Woods at the table,” says PrimaPoker.com spokeswoman Susan Lindner, “and you actually have a shot at beating them.”

Moneymaker’s victory has caused an incredible amount of interest in this year’s 35th annual tournament. More than 800 players had registered as of this week, 10 times the number at this time last year. Harrah’s took over as host of the event after Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel and Casino was shut down by the Internal Revenue Service in January. Harrah’s expects to have up to 2,000 players and a pot twice as big as last year’s.

The main event at the world series is a seven-day No-Limit Texas Hold ’em tournament that costs $10,000 to enter. In Texas Hold ’em, players are each dealt two cards face-down that can be combined with five community cards laid face-up. The last of the five cards is called “the river” and can instantly turn a weak hand into a winner. No-limit means players can bet all of their chips on any hand.

Hundreds of players tried to earn a seat in the world series in Greektown’s play-in tournament this spring. After 10 weeks of competition, Anthony Reed of Detroit won a two-week trip to Las Vegas and $10,000 to buy a seat in the tournament.

Dennis Sirianni of Grosse Pointe Woods was one of those who lost along the way. He used to play at buddies’ houses but said coming to the poker room makes games more fun.

“For $100, you can play like they do on TV,” says Sirianni, a 54-year-old, laid-off machinist who spends five days a week in Greektown’s Texas Holdem poker room — and is by no means the only one.

“Some are here when I walk in and they’re here when I leave,” says poker room manager Glenn Arana. “So they’re putting in 40 to 50 hours a week at least.”

Dealer Shirley Fileccia, who has worked at Greektown since it opened, says she sees most of the same people just about every time she works. “We know them all by name,” she says. “It’s like being married to them.”