Sports come in all forms and fashions. In many countries, swimming takes center stage. It is an easy sport to get into because most everyone lives near a pool or a body of water suitable for swimming. In Japan, you can enjoy a bout of sumo wrestling, assuming that you like to watch two men, wearing loin clothes, pushing each other around a ring. In Canada, you can take in a game of curling if you like to watch large rocks sliding across a frozen lake. Every game has its place and time, and card games definitely have theirs.

The poker family of card games has enjoyed a great rise in popularity in the twenty-first century due to a couple of factors. The first factor is the rise of online poker, which allowed gambling outside of states that offer it legally. The second is the implementation of the hole-cam in televised tournaments.

A hole-cam is a camera that has been built into a poker table to show each player’s cards during the game. The camera can be situated under the table if the top is glass or a small window is built in, or it can placed in the raised bumper around the edge. If placed in the table top, each player needs to place his or her cards face-down for the camera to see them. If the camera is in the bumper, the players can hold their cards naturally. This feature has significantly increased the need for custom poker tables.

The hole-cam has allowed audiences to more thoroughly enjoy the process of poker games. The audience can see what the players are holding and can analyze their thinking, and poker tournaments have become something of a study in card and gaming psychology. The games are delayed during broadcasting so that the audience cannot communicate important information to the players or influence the outcome of the game. Likewise, commentators usually record their comments after the play is complete, also to avoid impacting the player’s choices.