The Texas Hold 'Em phenomenon may be tapering off from its white hot streak across the U.S. media, but that doesn't mean there aren't folks out there still trying to cash in on the "sport" that made Phil "The Poker Brat" Hellmuth, Chris Moneymaker, Phil "Tiger Woods of Poker" Ivey - and the gent whose name is emblazoned on this particular game, Daniel "Kid Poker" Negreanu - household names.

Texas hold 'em is the most popular poker variant played today. It's what you see played in the World Series of Poker on ESPN, and the World Poker Tour on The Travel Channel. Legend has it that the earliest game played was in Robstown, Texas, in the early 1900s. Several years later it was introduced to Las Vegas by a group of Texas card slingers that included Crandell Addington, Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson and Thomas Austin "Amarillo Slim" Preston, Jr. - all Poker Hall of Fame inductees.

It's now played by millions of wannabe Poker Tour "legends" in cigar filled basements and living rooms across the nation - including myself, someone who is usually drawing dead and going on tilt. Once every three or four weeks my circle of friends rotate houses, crack out the poker accoutrements we each all bought on eBay, fill up the ice chests with beer, open the windows (cigar smoke smells good at the time your smoking them, but not four days later), put on some Texas Blues (from the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Seth Walker, or Kenny Wayne Shepherd), and lose our money (and minds) until the wee hours of the morning. Sound familiar?

And therein lies the biggest problem with most video poker games: there is simply no way to recreate the setting I just described. And because playing cards is as much about reading your opponents (through their tells, and more importantly - their betting patterns) as it is knowing how to actually play the game, it's hard for artificial intelligence to ever really be a worthy opponent. Enter Negreanu's Stacked, and an attempt to change all that.

This game uses an artificial intelligence model called Poki, a real world A.I. research project that has been applied to teaching poker. The key to its "success" is that it learns what you do as you play, and reacts based on what its learned. There are no pre-programmed, unrealistic responses here. This "learning curve" is carried out via the eight different bots supposedly in the game, each of which plays differently. There's one that plays aggressively, one that plays close to the sleeve, while the others play in varying degrees in-between. In the end it means that the game's A.I. will play extremely realistically (as opposed to something you'd find on Yahoo!), which is fine considering you'll probably buy Stacked to help you improve your real life game.