In the year 2001, according to a census taken by me, only a few hundred people in the United States played no-limit hold’em and pot-limit hold’em in legal, public poker rooms.  (We called no-limit and pot-limit “big bet poker” to distinguish them from limit poker.)  As to pot-limit, there was one table in Hollywood Park, California. There was one table in Oceanside, California.  And there was one table in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  As to no-limit hold’em, there was one table at the El Dorado in Reno, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, several casinos spread no-limit, but they didn’t all go every night.  The average for the whole Bay Area was about two tables per night, bringing the total number of no-limit hold’em games in the country to three.

Six tables.  Of all the tables of legal, public, cash-game hold’em going on in the United States in 2001 – in Vegas and L.A. and Atlantic City and along the Mississippi River and everywhere else – all of it was limit except for about six tables.  Tens of thousands of poker players loved to read, write, and think about cash-game big-bet hold’em, but hardly anyone got to actually play it.  (I was one of the lucky ones.  Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself during my growing pains: “I am one of the chosen few who has the opportunity to get run over by the Cadillac of poker!”)