/ Editor / 03 December 2007 / Leave a comment

POKER has a celebrity face. Says American actor and game show host Drew Carey: "Maybe Dallas wouldn't be ranked as the 34th most dangerous city in America if Dallas police weren't devoting precious resources to raiding friendly poker games played by veterans."

Carey in speaking in Reason magazine. "In his latest video for Reason.tv, Drew Carey examines a paramilitary-style raid on a poker game at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1837 in Dallas, which has now been forced to close its doors."

In America poker is not as it is here in the UK, reinvented and reinvigorated online.

Says Carey: "Poker is about as American as baseball and apple pie. It was born here in America. Mark Twain loved it. He's a great American. Until recently, Supreme Court justices had a monthly game. They're great Americans. You'd think playing poker in a VFW hall would be about as American as anything you could do."

According to whatscookingamerica.net, apple pie has been around since the Middle Ages. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink notes: "As a favoured dish of the English, pies were baked in America as soon as the early settlers set up housekeeping on dry land."

As for Baseball, that's a British game of rounders, albeit with big gloves and spitting.

Which leaves poker, a card game adapted from French, Persian and British card games.

Cary makes a, er, good point. Poker is an American game, albeit one you cannot play online.

As one legendary American put it: "The British are coming." And we're bringing poker...

Tags: Drew Cary, Poker