Amateur poker players can find poker tournaments, poker charity games, video poker and poker homes games to play poker with friends, co-workers, neighbors and poker players from across the globe. PokerStars provides poker games and poker tournaments where poker players can play poker for free and win money! Sign-up for free and download free poker software to improve your poker skills!

The two largest and most well-known poker tournaments are the World Poker Tour championship event and the World Series of Poker, both held in Las Vegas, Nevada. The World Series has traditionally been featured on ESPN. Many tournament poker players practice their poker skills in poker games such as those at PokerStars.

The 2005 World Series of Poker was the first held outside of Binion's Horseshoe Casino, though the final few days of the main event were held in the legendary Benny's Bullpen. Future tournaments will be held at one of the Harrah's Entertainment properties; 2005 saw the Rio as primary venue.

Many players learn tournament poker at sites like PokerStars.com, the number one site on the Internet for poker tournaments.

Arguably the most publicized European tournament is the Poker Million, which began in 2000 on Sky Sports, following on from the success of the Late Night Poker television show.

In addition to these poker events, there are other major poker tournaments throughout the year. The World Poker Tour broadcasts a series of open tournaments throughout the U.S. and Caribbean with buy-ins from $5,000 to $25,000, as well as a European event with a 10,000 buy-in. Some of these events are stand alone tournaments like the Caribbean Poker Adventure, but most are held in conjunction with a poker tournament series being held at the host casino, like the Commerce Casino's LA Poker Classic, the Reno Hilton's World Poker Challenge and the Bicycle Casino's Legends of Poker.

Atlantic City hosts The United States Poker Championship - The United States Poker Championship (USPC) is a major annual stop on the poker tournament "tour". This poker event is held at the Trump Taj Mahal. A series of poker tournaments culminates with a $10,000 no-limit Texas hold 'em poker championship tournament televised by ESPN.

Edmond Hoyle (1672 - August 29, 1769), also known as Edmund Hoyle, is a writer best known for his works on the rules and play of card games. The phrase "according to Hoyle" came into the language as a reflection of his generally-perceived authority on the subject; since that time, use of the phrase has expanded into general use in situations in which a speaker wishes to indicate an appeal to a putative authority. Little is known about most of Hoyle's life, though he is widely believed to have been trained to become a barrister. In 1741, Hoyle began working as a whist tutor to members of high society. Along with personal instruction, he sold a short booklet on the game to his clients, describing his basic approaches to the game. The booklet became quite popular, and unauthorized copies of it were circulated about London. To prevent this, Hoyle published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742, copyrighting his work.

Because of his success, Hoyle followed with similar treatises on backgammon, chess, quadrille, piquet, and brag. In 1750, a single compendium of these was published.

The first fifteen editions of Hoyles' works are now extremely rare and mostly owned by collectors. Only two copies of Hoyle's original work on whist (the first edition) are known to still exist; one is in the Bodleian Library. Only one copy (a fore-edge painted volume now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center) is known to exist of his first edition work on Backgammon [1].

A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist was regarded as authoritative until 1864, after which time they were superseded by the new rules written by John Loraine Baldwin and adopted by the Arlington and Portland clubs.

Many modern card game rule books contain the word "Hoyle" in the title, but the moniker does not mean that the works are derivative of Hoyle's. Because of his contributions to gaming, he was a charter inductee into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979.

See also

• Card game