08:30 AM EST on Thursday, April 1, 2004

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

Journal photo / Kathy Borchers Rachel Anter, left, of Lincoln, places her bet as dealer Steven Zeldin collects the chips at the New England poker Classic at Foxwoods.

LEDYARD, Conn. -- Foxwoods has a full house. Poker's the draw.

Actually, it's all the rage. Ever since cable TV began broadcasting the World Poker Tour last year using tiny cameras showing viewers the players' cards, strategy and psychology, the game's popularity has surged.

"Before that, it was like watching paint dry," says Jim Christina of Westerly, an assistant floor supervisor at Foxwoods.

On this day, Christina is overseeing the casino's seven-card stud hi-lo (half the pot goes to the best high hand, half to the best low hand) game. It's the middle of the 11-day New England Poker Classic tournament, which wraps up Saturday after a record run.

Last year, the tournament's biggest day attracted 720 players. This year, it's 1,103. Many are in their 20s and 30s. Almost all are males.

"They're rejuvenating the game," says Kathy Raymond, Foxwood's director of poker operations. "It's the new extreme sport. It's an adrenaline rush pushing your stack in."

That happens only in games with no betting limit. In this tournament, there are games with limits and no limits, and each day offers a different variety of poker.

All aren't equally appreciated. Today's seven-card stud (players use their best five cards to make a hand) doesn't have the TV-promoted popularity of the hold 'em version of poker (players combine their two cards with five community cards to make their best hand). In this game, 125 players compete, of which just six are women.

"These young guns come in here wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, stare down the other players and want to go all in (put all their chips in the pot)," Christina says. "I personally think they should go back to college and get a job."

Hard lessons

Playing poker is how Rachel Anter put herself through three years of college, URI. Her mother taught her the fundamentals. After that, the 29-year-old Lincoln woman says, she learned by losing.

"It takes a lot of determination and tenacity," Anter says. "It's not easy. If you're comfortable with short-term gains, it works. You can't try to break the bank."

Playing poker, Anter says, requires "a thick skin. You can't let what people say to you get to you." Sometimes, she says, it's what people don't say to you.

Around oval-shaped green-felt-covered tables eight players sit. The dealer takes a seat, called being in the box, and often begins a game by reflexively saying, "Hi gentlemen."

"I usually am not acknowledged," Anter says, adding that the gentlemen aren't always gentlemanly. "They're cursing, but it's not anything my virgin ears haven't heard before."

A year ago, Anter opened a sports and hobby shop so she can "get paid regularly and consistently." A conventional job, she says, supplements and stabilizes the highs and lows of poker playing, which she does in person and online.

At this tournament you see some players wearing sunglasses, which Anter says can be intimidating, making it more difficult to call their bluffs. Some wear baseball caps with visors pulled low.

That's how Anter plays on this day. But for her it's not a tactic but a cover-up.

"It's a bad hair day," she says.

Luck and strategy

Ray Bernstein of Cranston sits at the other end of the table from Anter. He's 55 and has been playing poker for 27 years, the last 12 professionally. This is his job, with which he supports a family.

"I wasn't very professional today," Bernstein says. "I'm out; they're in."

The difference, Bernstein says, comes down to the cards. He says he played well, but got beat by better hands.

"I got unlucky is basically what happened," Bernstein says.

The former insurance adjuster and real estate broker says that in poker "winning is a result of a series of decisions."

Holding and folding cards, money management and other players' betting tendencies all factor into the decision-making of every hand, Bernstein says.

"Where are the other players looking? How do they handle their chips?"

With the exception of some sporadic small talk and the dealers announcing which player has the bet, all you hear are chips -- being stacked, shuffled or tossed. Their clicking almost sounds like a forest full of crickets at night.

The surge of poker players has helped the game, Bernstein says, by "legitimizing it," making it "mainstream" and increasing the size of tournament prizes.

But on weekends, he says, poker's popularity can be a problem at Foxwoods, the only legal place to play the game in New England.

"It's hard to find a seat," Bernstein says. "These people are in the way."