According to the PokerStars website, a deck of 52 cards can be shuffled into 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,404,000,000,000,000,000 sequences. Among them we'll find every last combination of holecards, burn cards, flops, turns, sixth streets, and rivers. Players tend to be furious when, with all of these possible variations, they're dealt a dozen hands in a row that are more or less the same, without a single card higher than 7, for example - unless they're playing lowball, of course, in which case they're thrilled. The length of this number also has a lot to do with why the winner of the World Series of Poker main event is no longer thought of as poker's best player.

The "Poker Boom" unofficially detonated on the evening of March 30, 2003, with the Travel Channel's first broadcast of the Five-Diamond World Poker Classic at Bellagio. Produced by Steven Lipscomb, the show's lavish production values blended tabletop holecard cameras, informative sidebars, and beginner-level explanations from Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten, and all of it was hosted by Playboy cover girl Shana Hiatt, who often wore just a bikini. (The commentary would become more sophisticated as casual viewers began to pick up on the tactics and lingo of tournament hold'em.) The World Poker Tour went on to average 1.1 million viewers during its first season, with reruns attracting an estimated 4 million per show.

In 1990, the first non-American player, an Iranian-born resident of Wales named Mansour Matloubi, won poker's world championship. Johnny Chan was born in Guangzhou, a Chinese city not far from Hong Kong, but was raised for the most part in Phoenix and Houston, where his family owned restaurants. He was an American citizen living in Las Vegas and had been playing professionally there for nine years when he first won in 1987.