The Felt Vol. 1

With apologies to Sports Illustrated humorist Bill Sheft, I present to you The Felt.

It's getting stormy in the poker room. The other day Men Nguyen asked the waitress for a Corona and his fellow players asked for raincoats.

Good hygiene and manners have never really been important things to practice in poker rooms. Men Nguyen sniped at Phil Hellmuth during the National Heads-Up Championship and Hellmuth, of course, sniped at everyone within ear shot. I heard his imaginary friend is suing him for slander.

The cattiness of all this back and forth between poker pros is enough to inspire a soap opera, the only problem is 95 percent of the players are men. Maybe they could call it "The Young and the Breastless," Greg Raymer notwithstanding.

It's really not surprising that "Tilt" was not well received. The game of poker is not filled with murders and extortionists. Well, there was that one time when Phil Ivey called the fashion police to apprehend Freddy Deeb during the 2003 World Series of Poker.

And of course a certain mouthy player found himself in jail recently. There was an unfortunate incident the other day. He was playing a friendly game of strip poker with cellmates in the Clark County Jail when he dropped the deck and bent over to pick it up only to find a seven in the hole -- inches that is.

The prize pools of tournaments are getting bigger and bigger. You can thank Annie Duke for this. The winner of this year's after-WSOP Tournament of Champions receives $2 million and a case of Dr. Scholls.