Full Tilt Poker’s pros — Howard Lederer, Erick Lindgren, Bloch, Ferguson, Ivey, Gordon, Seidel, Harman and others — are among the superstars of the game. Ivey, a 28-year-old from Atlantic City, N.J., is one of the only world-class black players and he inevitably draws comparisons to Tiger Woods.

When Full Tilt Poker threw a lavish charity bash at the chic La Bete nightclub last week, the players and celebs turned out. Penn Jillette, the big, loud half of the Penn & Teller magic and comedy duo, was there to join his poker buddies.

“Every poker player I knew until the year 2000 was a cheat — and that’s not because of the people I know, though it’s also that,” Penn said. “They’d deal bottoms. They could do everything. I never played with friends because I knew there’d be a cheat there. Then the Full Tilt Poker guys came in with a kind of macho math and playing straight.

“Now there are 150 people playing poker that I believe aren’t cheating. That would not have happened anywhere in the world 20 years ago.”

Penn believes most games still have cheats.

“All your country club games, all your friendly games, the cops and the firemen on the corner, they have a buddy there. In every one of those games someone’s cheating, and it’s a full-time cheat,” said Penn, who is working on a book called “How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker” about a friend who “wasted his life” doing just that.

“Even in the World Series, there’s always nail nicks on the cards,” Penn said. “Those could happen accidentally but they don’t. If you nail-nick one card, and you know what one card out of the deck gives you, even something useless like the four of clubs, your edge becomes extraordinary. You can tell when someone might be bluffing. You can tell what’s coming up. And that involves sticking your finger on the side of the card and remembering which card you did it to.

“All the Full Tilt guys will notice it and call for a new deck. But when you’ve got thousands of people playing, it’s a good opportunity for cheating.”

The alternative to cheating is having brains, skill and luck.

“If you have two aces and I have two kings, and all the money goes into the pot, you feel great about your chances of winning,” Gordon said. “But 18 percent of the time you’re going to lose. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot. But you’re going to get dealt pocket aces 14 times on average, about once every 221 hands or once every five hours. So if this scenario happened to you 14 times, your chances of surviving all 14 confrontations are only about 3 percent. It’s the power of statistics.”

Yet poker still retains its power to mesmerize players and fans, whether they’re new to the game or they played on their kitchen table when they were kids.

“Now everybody wants to play poker because they want to be like the guys on TV, they want to be like the celebrities,” said Esfandiari, a 26-year-old who made his unique journey to the World Series from a childhood in Iran to an adolescence in San Jose, Calif., from a fascination with magic to a passion for poker. His first trick was “the floating dollar bill.” Now he’s floating millions from poker.

“When people start playing poker, they realize what a beautiful game it is,” he said. “It’s so pure in that there are no repeat situations. You can never have the same thing happen. You’re always learning.”

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