For now, the names Kirill Gerasimov, Valery Ilikyan, Vyacheslav Karpov and Kirill Rabtsov may mean nothing to many people, they are part of an upcoming poker community now playing in Russia.

Until recently, poker had been largely a US-dominated activity, with the UK hard on its heels - and very few outside these 2 countries (some well-known Scandinavians and Australians notwithstanding).

Whilst poker is still relatively small in Russia, with most of the games happening in a few clubs in Moscow and St Petersburg - the latest Russian Poker Championship attracted 48 of the best players in the country - and the advent of online poker has indicated there are thousands of Russians playing via the internet.

In fact, poker is continuously gaining popularity - with a modest 100 players currently playing clubs, there are a number of new online sites aimed at Eastern Europe - one poker site operator suggests Party Poker had 1000 Russians playing at their site - whilst his own site, redstarpoker, currently has over 5000 registered users in just 4 months

Moscow's first poker clubs opened up in the late 1990s at local casinos, and interest in the game has steadily grown, said Vince Conte, poker club operator at Casino de Paris.

On any given night, there are around 100 poker players competing in Moscow casinos such as Korona, Shangri La, the Cosmos Casino, Casino de Paris and the Jazz Town Casino, Conte said.

While the ranks of professional players in North America and Western Europe have been flooded in recent years with gamblers who got their start online, Russia's pros are primarily a mix of gamblers and ex-card dealers who happened to discover the game in the casinos they haunted

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