Okay, look. I realize that poker seems to have come from nowhere and exploded into this weirdly successful phenomenon almost overnight, but can we please quit it with the obituaries?

In order to keep you folks abreast of the latest happenings in the poker world, I subscribe to several poker news sources, and I have an entire category in my personalized Google News page for poker stories, and in the last ten days, there have been as many stories about the death of poker as there have been press releases announcing some stupid new promotion that will fail to draw players away from the large, reputable online poker sites.

The key reason cited for this "bursting of the poker bubble" is -- and I'm not making this up -- the flood of cheap poker chips and other poker-related merchandise being placed on clearance in stores across America.

As my friend Otis said, "I thought about the chip sales falling off and wondered if there had been a time during the beginning of televised baseball in which bats and gloves sold like hotcakes. Eventually, nearly every kid on the block had one. Bats and gloves last for a long time, so there was no reason to buy new ones. Kind of like poker chips and plastic cards, now that I think about it. Did some economy wonk say baseball was dead? 

I kept digging through the story looking for some further evidence that poker was dead and I was screwing a corpse (necrophilia never having beeen among my top ten fetishes, I was a little worried I'd turned an ugly corner). Apparently some father of a teenager said his son was at once time excited about the game, but now never talks about it."

Well, if there's something we can all agree on, it's that teenagers know everything, right? No less an *ahem* authority and CNN agrees, if a recent article at cnn.com is any indication. You can read the entire story by clicking below, but test your stomach out with this brilliant observation, first: "It is a pop fad," said Bill Thompson, author and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "Fads pass."

Poker sets, once displayed prominently at his local Walgreen (Research), have been moved further back into the store, he said. 

That idiotic statement comes from the same Bill Thompson who is the anti-gambling zealot behind "let's blame online poker for the kid who robbed the bank." CNN did a great job of finding a person without an agenda who could objectively enlighten their audience, didn't they? And who knew that Walgreen was the barometer for American Popular Culture? I guess we should all be abandoning poker, wearing English Leather and drinking Shasta if we want to keep up with the Joneses.

Otis observes, correctly, that parties on both sides of this argument base their convictions on anecdotal evidence. he also observes, correcty, that we are right and they are wrong. He also points to three very good reasons that support his position:

• The World Series of Poker had more then 5600 entrants this year
• PokerStars weekly tournament (that requires people to put up $200 to play) nearly doubled in size in one year
• During peak hours, PokerStars climbed above 75,000 players at one time

As I wrote several months ago, the real test of poker's popularity is how many games there are, and how easy or hard it is to get into them. It isn't how well cheaply-made merchandise is selling, or what the ratings are for one of the countless televised games we can watch on any given night. Yes, the secondary markets created by the Moneymaker Effect(tm) will certainly slow, but that has nothing to do with the inherent popularity of poker, and everything to do with the quality of their product. Poker is doing just fine, online and in real life. I would like it if there weren't so many macho-man types in their early twenties, though. You know, the ones you always see drinking Shasta in Walgreens?