Tired of high cellphone bills? Maybe you can win some of that money back.

Now you can whip out your cellphone and dial into a new service that lets people around the world play poker against one another, for real money.

It's a poker lover's dream, a gambling addict's obsession, and the anti-gambling lobby's worst nightmare. For Patrik Selin, CEO of Stockholm-based PokerRoom.com, it's the next great opportunity in online gambling.

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''We are the first site in the world where you can actually play peer-to-peer for real money," said Selin. And if you get bored with cellphone poker, you can relax by playing wireless slots or betting on sports events. But it's poker, especially the popular variant known as Texas Hold'em, where Selin figures to clean up.

Ever since cable television channels began running poker tournaments three years ago, the game has become a national pastime. And thanks to the Internet, you can play for real money anywhere there's a computer and a modem. According to Pokerpulse.com, a company that tracks the card craze, 1.7 million people played Internet poker for real money last month. And that's very real money -- about $190 million changes hands in these online games every day.

But card sharps needn't huddle over a hot computer. Today's cellphones have enough computing power to host online card games. That's why Selin's company devised software to let gamers tie into his Internet casino, which has a million regular visitors.

''Ninety percent are doing this for pure entertainment, nothing else," Selin said. These punters use play money. But players can also create real money accounts, loading in cash with a credit card. The same technology lets successful players shift their winnings into a bank account. PokerRoom.com makes its money by taking a percentage from every pot.

Only confirmed poker fanatics will want to spend much time playing on their phones. The games eat up your minutes and battery power, and the tiny screen on the average cellphone makes a lousy poker table. Although users of any cellular phone network can take part in the games, only a relative handful of handsets are currently compatible. PokerRoom.com is moving fast to expand the reach of its software.

Though Selin claims he's the first to run cellphone poker games, he'll soon have competition. Zone4Play, a software company with offices in Delaware and Israel, has developed an offering that's being deployed by European online gambling services like Coral Eurobet, Britain's third-largest operator of gambling parlors. ''They can keep on playing poker on the way to work or in the pub," said Idan Miller, Zone4Play's senior vice president of marketing.

But not if they work in America. Miller said his company won't sell its gaming software to companies that do business here, because his company's shares trade in the US over-the-counter stock market. That means Zone4Play is within easy reach of the US Justice Department, which views online gambling with disfavor.

You wouldn't know it judging by the popularity of Internet gambling, but the practice is illegal in the United States. At least, that's the Justice Department's view, based on a 1961 law that banned phone or telegraph bookmaking services. But the law says nothing about the Internet, and at least one federal court has said it doesn't apply there. Someday the matter will be settled, but none of the major online gambling houses wants to be the test case.

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So Zone4Play writes its betting software but sells it only abroad. Americans who want to gamble online subscribe to services based outside of US jurisdiction, like PokerRoom.com, with its headquarters in Stockholm and its Internet servers on an Indian reservation in Canada.

Critics of legalized gambling, already appalled by the spread of online casinos, view the coming of cellphone wagering with undisguised dread. ''Anytime you are expanding gambling on an electronic platform, I think there are concerns about gambling addiction," said Carey Theil, a Brighton resident who sits on the board of the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion. ''Studies have shown that the faster [the] forms of gambling are, the more addictive they are."

The slow pace of a traditional poker game acts as a buffer, giving players time to back out of a game before losing all their money. But Theil worries that electronic poker, by phone or PC, makes it too easy to quickly play game after game and wipe out a compulsive player's bank account.

Selin acknowledges that cellphone gambling could be easily abused but says his company tries to protect players from themselves. For instance, gamers can set limits on the amounts they can lose in a given period; once set, the limit can't be changed for three to six months. The idea is to force players into a cooling-off period and prevent binge playing.

Even with such controls, Theil worries about the ability to gamble anytime, anywhere. Once, people had to be in Las Vegas to bet; then gambling came to the Indian reservations, the supermarket lottery counter, the home computer. Soon we'll all have casinos in our hip pockets. ''It's like cancer; it metastasizes," Theil said of the gambling business. ''It will expand into anywhere it's allowed to expand. The lust for profit, for this industry and its promoters, doesn't cease."

Perhaps not. But the lust for gambling doesn't cease either. And while the practice is associated with vice and crime in the United States, it's considered legitimate entertainment in much of the world, no more immoral than an evening at the movies. Despite the somber disapproval of the feds, millions of Americans are already logging on to ante up. Soon many of them will be dialing for dollars.

Source: Boston News