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Fox Sports Net is making a bet that turkey-sated, football-overdosed viewers will take the time today to punctuate holding with hold-'em.

That's poker, son. Texas hold-'em.

Mixing a traditional family holiday with gambling, and taking on king football in the process, might not seem wise -- until you look at the ratings poker tournaments and re-runs of same have been pulling on ESPN and The Travel Channel.

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Fox deals up six consecutive one-hour shows today, beginning at 12:30 p.m., chronicling the "Showdown at the Sands" poker tournament, which wrapped up Monday night in Atlantic City, N.J. The final two hours will be repeated beginning at 8 p.m.

"I wish I could tell you it's a stroke of genius," said George Greenberg, the executive vice president for programming and production who is the main man on this show. "Quite simply, it's ratings. We think poker is on the upswing of ratings potential. With the right format, this show, we believe, has room to grow in the programming area."

Purists will cry "misdeal." Poker isn't a sport. It is, however, pretty darn entertaining stuff.

Begin by discarding time-worn stereotypes of gamblers as social misfits, short on education and etiquette. These players often are highly educated, sophisticated customers relying on a combination of precise mathematical calculation as well as intuition.

It's the big money at stake that makes this kind of poker so different from that practiced in weekly home games. The top prize in this tournament is a cool $1 million. It cost $10,000 just to enter. Among those taking the plunge was actor Ben Affleck.

The big money, and the nature of Texas hold-'em, where players are dealt two cards facedown, then play and bet on a total of five community cards flopped face up in the middle of the table -- three first, then one and one -- make for tense action. At any time, a player can bet all his chips.

"I think there's drama in seeing someone take $250,000 in chips and go all-in," Greenberg said.

"A top poker player has to get to a place in his head where chips are just that. In the elite poker world, you've got to be ready to die to achieve a championship. It's kill or be killed. Some do it with panache. Some do it in a very stealthy way."

The angle Fox is pitching to hype its coverage is the relative immediacy. Customarily, these events show up on television months after they are held. In this instance, it is days.

Fox used 21 cameras, 21 tape machines, 12 instant-replay machines and three continuously running editing computers to cover the event. There also were heart monitors hooked up to several players to track changes as they played big hands.

"People (channel) surfing, if they see poker, they know it means drama and high stakes," Greenberg said.

Fox Sports Net is counting on that meaning ratings, too.

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