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"Dead money," explained Ken Warren, a Biloxi-based professional poker player, "is money put into a pot by a player who has no chance of winning that pot."

Young and inexperienced, but full of the bravado bred by too many TV and Internet games, Dopson is part of a new wave of aggressively inept players filling casino poker rooms along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere, chasing riches like modern-day prospectors while raining money on regulars who haven't seen paydays like these since illegal gambling flourished here decades ago.

They've made the game both cool and profitable, prompting a mini-NASCAR explosion of youthful popularity in casino card rooms that just two years ago resembled retirement rec centers.

Mimicking players from televised tournaments — mirrored sunglasses, ballcaps, unlit cigarettes — they swell rooms like brigades of Poker Youth.

Not long ago, casinos were replacing poker rooms with more profitable slot machines; now some rooms are expanding, with waiting times for a table often stretching for hours.

That's not all that has changed. Fueled by the flood of televised Texas Hold 'Em tournaments on The Travel Channel, ESPN and even the arts network Bravo, these young guns bring an edited-for-TV, risk-it-all style to a game that has long put a premium on patience and nuance.

It would be like basketball learned from a highlight reel of slam dunks, or guitar from an MTV music video. They treat the lowliest cards like lottery tickets — they bet on everything — infuriating purists even as the winnings of many old-line players have jumped as much as 50 percent.

"I love poker. I'm making money. But it's not poker anymore," said Claud Sigmon, a longtime Biloxi pro. "You have to play stupid."

Dopson didn't disappoint his first game's seasoned tablemates: Seven hands after being seated, he'd converted the $40 he couldn't afford to lose into "dead money." He exited 15 minutes after he arrived.

"I lost. I lost pretty damn quick, too," he said afterward, wandering among the slot machines. "I didn't even have time to soak it up. I got cocky in there. But if I had the money, I'd do it again.

"The money they win on TV," he mused. "It's any man's dream to make money by getting lucky without really having to lift a finger."

A game revived

People have tried to make money without lifting a finger forever on this weathered coast. Illegal gambling was so rampant through the mid-1960s that some hotels openly housed 8,000-square-foot casinos. Authorities assessed a "black market tax" on beach bars that offered poker, blackjack and craps games.

"Gambling has always been a way of life down here," said Rip Poulos, 71, a local poker pro who once ran 37 dice games from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula. "People here just grew into it."

That ended in the late '60s, when the feds drove gambling underground after crackdowns sparked by complaints from nearby Keesler Air Force Base, whose recruits were regularly clipped in rigged games.

Legal, dockside casinos landed in Mississippi in 1992, transforming a fading beach resort into a kind of Bubba Vegas. Poker rooms thrived for a while, luring the tail end of an older generation raised on all-night kitchen-table games.

But as they died out, so did the game. Then came a modern confluence of cable TV, the Internet and the most fittingly named high-stakes poker player of all time: Chris Moneymaker.

An unassuming Tennessee accountant who often plays wearing a ballcap and sunglasses, Moneymaker, 27, qualified for the 2003 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas — his first live tourney ever — after paying $40 to enter an on-line satellite tournament. He won the whole shebang and its $2.5 million pot. ESPN televised it. Millions watched.

With time-lapse editing, cameras peeping under cards and a game called No Limit Texas Hold 'Em — in which players can push forward every chip and announce "All in!" — each hand made viewers feel like Steve McQueen in the dramatic finale of the classic card film "The Cincinnati Kid."

The Travel Channel aired weekly tournaments from exotic locations, other networks followed suit — and a phenomenon was born.

"Until a couple years ago, we spent a long time trying to cultivate new players," said Mike Smith, who runs the poker room at the Biloxi Grand Casino. "Then TV and the Internet did it for us."

For the most part, the poker room is the same as it ever was: a bazaar of felt tables ringed by 8 to 10 players, filled with smoke (except the new non-smoking rooms), small-talk and the constant, cicada-like click-clacking of chips being stacked and restacked.

But rooms now stop more often for those adrenaline-charged moments when one of the new "kamikazes," as some call the newbies, slides all his chips into the pot.

"They just like the action. It's about pushing it all in and seeing what you have," said Louie Marino, 27, a New Orleans longshoreman who learned to play long before poker was televised. "They like to hear that 'All in.' "

An expensive education

Fearlessness distinguishes these new bad players from the bygone variety, veterans say. Like a scratch-off Lotto player, they do occasionally get lucky, and when their outsized bets match their outsized luck, woe to everyone else at the table.

"I won't sit down when there's six of them at a table. You can't run 'em all down," said Herb Bollinger, 61, who drives to Gulfport from Mandeville, La., to play tournaments twice a week. "I can't bluff someone on a hand if they aren't experienced enough to know I'm bluffing. You have to pick your spots."

Plenty of players here are doing just that.

Victor McLean moved to the Mississippi coast last September from Blowing Rock, N.C., to play cards. Before that, he made his living as a sculptor.

"Just say I haven't had to sculpt anything lately," he said. Added Steele Catching, assistant poker room manager in Tunica, Miss., "A lot of these young guys come in with a pocket full of money wanting to become a poker star or something. But they're playing with people who've played a long time. They're getting a good education. Sometimes an expensive education."

Dopson sensed players salivating when he sat down for his first live game.

"I seen the experience at the table," he said. "But my bills are up on me. And when you watch someone like Moneymaker on TV, you think, 'I could be like him.'

"Before I came down here, I thought I was pretty damn good," he added. "Well, I just found out I'm not pretty damn good. I had to lose to learn."

And somebody else had to win.

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