A bad beat worth more than a million dollars Thursday night and potentially worth twice that in the April championship.

Gus Hansen raised the pot $230,000. Paul Phillips went all in with his $2.9 million. Dewey Tomko, the only other player at the table, folded.

It was on Hansen. If he called, he could lose his entire $2.2 million stake. If he called, he could also double up to $4.4 million and virtually wipe out chip leader Phillips.

Hansen called. All in. Hansen flipped over pocket 10s. Phillips showed ace-queen. Everybody stood.

The flop came…

DAY 1

There are lots of hats. Cowboy hats, straw hats, ball caps. And don't forget the floral visor and the pink bucket hat.

The shirts run from floral to dress to tie-dye, even basketball and hockey jerseys, the pants from fatigues to slacks to sweats.

They are young and old, men and women, white, Asian and just about everything else, and they are sporting sunglasses, hoodies, leather jackets and Discmen.

At times, the start of these suddenly monster poker tournaments can look like Halloween with money. But then you don't even notice, because it's money that makes the statements, and those with the big bully stacks wield it arrogantly and powerfully, if not artfully.

It's all about the money. It's all about having all the money. It is why a record 314 people plopped down $10,000 or played their way into the World Poker Tour's Five Diamond World Poker Classic in mid-December at the Bellagio to play four days of no-limit, freeze-out Texas Hold `Em. The last one with chips wins more than a million bucks.

In the turn of a card, poker crawled out of the basement and barged into your living room.

Every Wednesday the Travel Channel presents one of the World Poker Tour's 14 events. ESPN constantly reruns Binion's Horseshoe's World Series of Poker episodes. Bravo put together "Celebrity Poker Showdown." And now NBC has ordered a two-hour Travel Channel World Poker Tour "Battle of Champions" to run opposite the Super Bowl pregame show.

Ante up, America.

"I love it," said imposing poker legend T.J. Cloutier, a former Canadian Football League tight end and a road gambler whose rough-hewn voice reflects poker past. "It's great for us. It means bigger purses."

The World Poker Tour is the Travel Channel's highest-rated series. The Bellagio, the premier poker room in the country, has seen a 35 percent increase in cash play over the last 18 months. The online poker market is estimated to have grown five- or six-fold in the last year.

The lure is obvious: This could be you.

Because this has been you. The last two World Series of Poker winners were amateurs, most recently the wonderfully named Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker.

Moneymaker symbolizes this poker phenomenon. He paid $40 to enter an online tournament, won it, earned a spot in the World Series of Poker, then won $2.5 million and the treasured Hold 'Em bracelet. Not bad for a guy who had never played a live tournament.

"It's the biggest sport in the world for the aging Baby Boomers who can't get it done on the courts and field with much ardor," said James McManus, a Chicagoan who joined the pokerati by authoring the bestseller "Positively Fifth Street."

"You watch the NFL and you can't imagine yourself doing that," McManus said between hands of the Five Diamond event, "but anyone can win these events."

The anyones playing last week constituted a veritable all-star poker lineup, including legends Cloutier and Doyle "Dolly" Brunson, women Jennifer Harman, Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert, academics Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer, and young guns Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu and Layne Flack.

And of course, the arrogant Phil Hellmuth.

"Arrogant? No," Hellmuth insists. "Egomaniacal? Yes."

Hellmuth demands his own category and just might be the best in the world. "I think maybe right now I am," he said.

And all those amateurs coming over the top with re-raises.

"What I'm finding is, yeah they're green and they're inexperienced," said Lederer, a two-time WPT champion, "but they're playing like no other brand-new players I've ever played with."

Because they can. You'll never play Augusta against Tiger Woods, but you certainly can put your money and your game against the legendary Brunson or rising star Ivey.

And whoa, look at that, there's Ivey now, bolting from the tables. Poker's first black superstar suddenly is out on the first day.

Same goes for Brunson. And Lederer. And Hellmuth, Harman and Flack. To think, Lederer and Harman live in Vegas, and Lederer's wife, Susan, is a manager in the Bellagio poker room. So much for home-casino advantage.

Maybe anyone can win these events.

DAY 2

One day of watching live poker and it's painfully evident: The game is boring, monotonous, frustrating. Torture by ante.