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Full house for a red-hot craze
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"For a $5 game it's surprising how often the sheep stations come out," Mr Coyle laughed.
"The guys get pretty vocal and excited when they find themselves with big hands, and the betting ramps up.
"But it's often when things go quiet that the real competition is going on. Everyone's trying to get inside each other's heads and everyone is bluffing or acting like they're bluffing when they're sitting pretty. It's great stuff."
Just last month, an American university student from Minnesota proved young people are playing -- and playing hard -- when he won $1.4 million in a high-stakes Limit Hold'em poker tournament on a Caribbean cruise.
The competition lasted five to eight hours a day for eight days and, from behind mirror sunglasses and a baseball cap, the 22-year-old beat veteran players from all over the world.
"It's grown amazingly since they started showing Texas Hold 'Em tournaments on pay-TV on a regular basis," Mr Coyle said.
"I hadn't even thought about poker until I sat down to channel surf at a friend's place one day and ended up wasting half the day watching poker.
"The rules are easy to learn. I think everyone knows what beats what in poker, it's like knowing the times table."
Poker has also been thrown into the spotlight by Australian player Joseph Hachem winning the 2005 World Series of Poker and a record-breaking $US7.5 million ($A10 million).
The Melbourne man said of his win: "It changes everything. I can look after my family, my mum, my kids."
Relationships Australia recently tagged the re-emergence of poker, internet access and phone accounts for betting and the lure of casinos as risks for young people.
It warned that while there was no harm in kids playing for poker chips, they could be tempted to play for money.
Relationships Australia Tasmania says play-gambling products groom young people for real gambling the same way lolly cigarettes used to groom children for tobacco smoking.
"The problem is that these gambling games give young people a false sense of security about gambling, which is then reinforced by advertising of real gambling products which claim that gambling is just harmless entertainment," the counselling group's Nick Weetman said.
Wade Pearce, 27, of Kingston, who plays at Mr Coyle's poker nights, said money wasn't an issue in his group.
"You do get something out of it if you win but people won't go broke playing for it," he said.
"We started it because we wanted an easy-to-arrange and relatively cheap social activity between our mates."
When the stakes are small and the emphasis on social interaction rather than gambling, players agreed the risks were minimal.
Source: http://www.themercury.news.com.au