The Rise of Poker

I love to play card games, including all the various variants of poker, which is fun but not my forte. Poker has seen a dramatic rise in popularity the past few years, not only due to poker TV shows or huge professional poker tournaments. Online gambling has proven huge: PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, to name a few, sometimes get over 100,000 players at one time. Even weirder is that poker is the third most watched sport on cable television, if you can call it a sport. It also brings in revenues of twenty billion dollars each year.
Poker is a combination of luck and skill, but more skill than the uninitiated would think. Most hands are played out without the cards ever being shown. Some people think that playing poker is actually good for you, for it hones patience and strategy skills.
What do you guys, or gals, think of poker? I personally believe that it should be completely legal, but as with all forms of gambling, can lead to some very dirty business when loans become a problem. It is kind of a waste of time, but if I am going to watch TV or play poker, I would definitely choose the latter.