I recently finished Anthony Holden’s Bigger Deal, a sequel to Big Deal, the memoir that made his name as a poker writer. Near the end of the book, he’s at the 2006 World Series of Poker, and I thought he captured the height of poker-boom silliness when he described a press conference during which Pamela Anderson introduced her own online poker site and was grilled about it by Robin Leach, who was “writing a Vegas blog for AOL.” But then two pages later, it was topped by this:

A monkey, name of “Mikey,” has been entered for this year’s main event. It’s a publicity stunt by a Web site called PokerShare, based on the tricksily punning slogan that “any chump” can win the thing. Harrah’s insists that the chimp cannot play as it would be “unhygienic”; the Web site responds that the animal will be wearing a diaper. Eventually, after a long search through its extensive rule book (full of regulations about rabbit-hunting, etc.), Harrah’s sees off PokerShare’s determined representatives with the definitive ruling that the chimp cannot play because it is . . . under twenty-one.