TWO things were missing from my childhood home (or three, if you count indoor plumbing). We never had spirits in the house and we didn't possess a pack of cards.

Granted, we were in Cromwell country but it wasn't the Lord Protector's lingering shadow that dictated their absence. My parents disliked the first and were not interested in the second. (The third we got in 1947.)

I grew up never playing Newmarket at Christmas or being taken to whist drives to complete a table. I hadn't the first idea about rummy or pontoon.

In my late teens, I was taught to play canasta to make up the required number for a Saturday night game, but teaching - or failing to teach - me to play solo was such a nightmare that my three card-playing friends copped out of trying to complete their bridge four.

As for me, I think any government serious about banning blood sports should instigate a commission to investigate bridge clubs.

Somewhere along the line, however, I was initiated into the ways of poker.

It was fortunate we never played for money because the earliest lesson I learned was that, if something vital depends on the turn of a card, the odds on the right card turning up are rather less than getting all six numbers up tomorrow evening.

More than that, I learned that I didn't have a "poker face" and that the phrase had nothing at all to do with fire irons.

No chance, then, of me joining the craze for the on-line game, said to be sweeping the nation. I can't even beat the home PC at patience (which it will Americanise as solitaire) more than about once a fortnight.

Actually, it isn't just my deep belief that cards turn in a spirit of pure malice which stops me even looking at an on-line game.

It's the thought of losing money. Not my money, anyone's money, as I find serious gambling scary. I'm the one who skipped pages in Georgette Heyer when the Regency bucks got down to the vowels, as they so delicately termed IOUs.

I suppose I'm in my usual minority on that one. As you read this, the poker World Series is taking place in Las Vegas and will go on until mid-July. At least poker, unlike baseball, has the international status for a "world series".

The ultimate winner will trouser $6m (knocking on for £3m) and there are thousands paying $10,000 simply to enter that big final game.

Just imagine being desperate for a particular card for a full house or a royal flush and not betraying by so much as a blink whether you're going to win through or lose your shirt.

At that rate, the $6m winner will have such a poker face that he won't even smile as he lays his cards on the table to show his hand - and there are three clichs card-players have given the language.

I say "he" because, in all I've read about the World Series, women have not featured, not even in a longish list of "celeb" entrants.

Yet the only on-line player I know is female and, I'm told, very good. Next time she calls in I must steel myself to ask for a demo.

But I'm only going to watch. Sometimes the safest thing to be is an interested bystander