Photo / Herald on Sunday

Photo / Herald on Sunday

Everyone has a poker face. Property marketer Kevin Clark's is introspective, verging on brooding. Publisher Martin Cardno's is stony, half-hidden by mirror-glasses.

TV presenter Brooke Howard-Smith talks a lot and calls his opponents "sweetheart" and "hotpants".

IT specialist Robert Wang grins and crows happily when he wins.

Their game on Thursday night at SkyCity is a friendly. But Cardno, 36, and Wang, 42, regularly play in tournaments overseas. They have an arrangement whereby one gets a percentage of the other's wins. This year, Cardno has played in 15 tournaments during eight trips and made $100,000 in winnings.

Kiwi professional players usually have to travel for the big money, but in the next four months New Zealand will host the two richest tournaments to be held here.

The first is a leg of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour at Auckland's SkyCity until next Sunday. It has an expected prize pool of $1m while the 2009 New Zealand championship, dubbed The Battle for Middle Earth, is at Christchurch Casino in January.

Buy-ins - the amount players have to put in the pot to join - are $3000 and $5000 respectively. Satellite tournaments played in casinos and pubs throughout the country give amateurs the chance to win a place at the big tournaments for free, or for under a $100 buy-in.

The coming-of-age for professional poker is the top end of a poker revival making exclamations like "I raised on the flop but there were too many overcards" normal conversation in many lounges and pubs throughout the country.

By some accounts, the international poker fever is three to five years more advanced in Australia, Europe and America, but we're catching on.

More than 750,000 Australians have played poker at least once in the previous 12 months, and about 450,000 who play poker (home game, casino, pub or club, online) at least once a week.

And 50m people in the United States play poker regularly.

There are no complete figures available here, but several thousand people play in the New Zealand Pub Poker League each week.

Lee Nelson, our resident celebrity poker professional, believes per capita our boom is well underway.

Nelson is co-commentator with Howard-Smith for the TV3 and C4 show, Celebrity Joker Poker. An affable American-born doctor now living in Nelson, his place in the poker firmament was assured in 2006 when he won the salubrious Aussie Millions, taking home $1.2 million.