This summer, Steven Garfinkle's e-mail inbox was flooded with congratulatory messages from students and colleagues, with many of the students asking if it would be all right if they stopped by Garfinkle's office to talk about the World Series of Poker. Garfinkle, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University in Washington state, just missed this year's WSOP main-event final table by one player, but his 10th-place finish was enough to get him on the front page of the local newspaper - twice - as well as in the school's newspaper.

Joe Hachem, 2006 World Series of Poker champion and Team PokerStars member, can add teacher to his resume. A day before the launch of the largest poker tournament Asia has ever seen, the Asian Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) Macau event, Hachem is huddled at a poker table with leading television and newspaper reporters from across Asia. Hachem's Texas hold'em crash course includes small laminated cards that rank hands, and equal parts of enthusiasm and patience.

In July 1917, Lt. Herbert O. Yardley was given a desk in the code room of the State-Navy-War Building, directly across from the White House. "By lifting my eyes from my work," he wrote, "I could see a tennis game in progress where a few years earlier President Roosevelt and his tennis Cabinet had played every day." He went on to describe the bulky code books and thick stacks of telegrams "from and to consular and diplomatic posts throughout the world" being thumbed by chain-smoking staffers. "The pounding of typewriters specially constructed to make fifteen copies of a telegram mingled with the muffled click of the telegraph instruments" - the sights, sounds, and smoke-marbled humidity of one of the most high-tech rooms in America.

As we went to press with this issue of Card Player, we learned of the untimely passing of David "Chip" Reese.

Most poker players love the High Stakes Poker (HSP) television show on the Game Show Network on Monday nights. It is a one-hour television program that is a high-stakes no-limit hold'em cash game in which the minimum buy-in is $100,000. HSP is shot in three eight-hour sessions on three consecutive days. Each eight-hour session turns into four episodes, so 12 episodes are shot over three days. On day two, the players were Daniel "Kid Poker" Negreanu, Jennifer Harman, Sammy Farha, Bob Safai, Eli Elezra, Brandon Adams, Jamie Gold, and I.

Gerber would be proud to sponsor this tourney, and its host, as well. It is the Scotty Nguyen Poker Challenge IV, held at the beautiful Cherokee Casino, just a 15-minute drive from the Tulsa airport. They refer to it as a tournament, but a major poker event would be a much more accurate description.

Florida is home to 24 legal cardrooms. I have a Christmas gift for the millions of Florida poker players. My buddy John can be found, bankroll in his pocket, prowling the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood and the Isle of Capri in Pompano Beach. He's been known to wander as far afield as Tampa, Brighton, and Immokalee. Boyd Gaming, the nation's third-largest gaming company, is renovating Dania Jai Alai, just three minutes from his home.

When the money goes in the middle, of course you'd like to be a favorite - better yet, a big favorite - but that's not the nature of hold'em. Granted, the biggest mismatch, overpair versus random undercards, wins about nine times out of 10, but most of your other edges are really rather slim. The well-known "coin flip," an underpair versus overcards, favors the underpair to the tune of 55 percent to 45 percent, which means that while you're a favorite, you're not a huge favorite; in the long run, you're not going to win much more often than you lose.

In no-limit hold'em cash games, you have several options of how to play a hand. Most important is not the exact play you select, but the reasoning that goes into choosing it. If your reasoning includes the correct factors, you can refine your game to make the right plays more often.