The TOKE: TOC Recap + Poker's Up, Poker's Down

:: Top notch TOC.  If you weren't too busy with that whole "Christmas" thing, or if you're not Christian, then perhaps you caught ESPN's new-and-improved WSOP Tournament of Champions on Christmas Eve with Matusow, Hellmuth, Corkins, and Dannenmann.  Wicked Chops Poker was going to recap it for you, but Card Player's synopsis was good enough for us.  Card Player

:: Long live poker!  More than $60 billion was gambled on online poker this year--which is equivalent to the amount of goods multinationals purchased from China in 2k5.  Which is a lot. Card Player

:: Poker is dying!  Another doomsday article about the fall of poker has hit.  "It is a pop fad," the article quotes Bill Thompson, author and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as saying, and "Fads pass."  As we've discussed before (as well as others)--and as our banner indicates--this couldn't be farther from the truth.  If poker is a fad, that's surely not discouraging a crop of new hopefuls from making a career out of it.  The real burning question though is: are they playing poker naked?  And is Estella Warren one of them?  Reuters