The way you keep score in poker is with the chips in front of you. The chips represent money. ln a cash game, you might buy $500 worth of chips and sit down at a table with them.

You might get up again two hours, six hours, twelve hours later, with ten times your original stake, or you might stumble from the table shell-shocked and dazed, with nothing.

Since the 1990s, tournament poker has become hugely popular, both in card rooms and on the Internet. You pay an entry fee - say $50 - and you receive chips to the value of, say, 1,000 units, as does everyone else. You then play until, one by one, players go bust and get knocked out, until finally, from a field of players which might have numbered twenty, a hundred or even as many as ten thousand, there is just one table of ten players left with everybody else’s chips divided up amongst them. This Final Table is a destination all tournament players dream about reaching, as here you are guaranteed a substantial prize and you are still in the hunt to win the whole event. These ten players continue playing until only one is left.
Usually, in a tournament, the winner will receive between one quarter and one third of all the entry fees. ln the World Championships - the World Series of Poker (WSOP) - played annually in Las Vegas each May and June, that first prize passed one million dollars years ago. Now, the winner is expected to take home in excess of five million dollars. To do it he, or she, has to beat several thousand of the world’s best players. ln the good old days, only the hardened old pros stood a chance. Now, their places are being usurped by young players, from all over the world, who have learnt at their computers and are coming to gun for the professionals. Two have already won the WSOP in the twenty-first century, and their challenge is going to grow and grow.