‘I do it as often as I can and I know scores of people who seem to be crazy about it,” said Iain Cook, a personable 31-year-old banker from north London. “I even know some girls who regularly stay up all night at it.”

What’s hooked Cook is playing poker for cash, a game once confined to smoky backroom bars now spreading through middle-class suburbia. Cook’s gang of poker buddies play at his state-of-the-art three-bedroom flat in Kilburn, while sipping Jack Daniel’s and beer and munching Waitrose pizza as chart favourites Keane play on the stereo.

They include a barrister, a journalist, a dentist and an anaesthetist — all, according to Cook, attracted by the louche glamour of the game and the rushes of adrenaline.

“It reminds people of the Wild West and is a sociable way to spend time with your mates without going to a pub,” said Cook, whose friends normally finish the night between £50 and £150 “up” or “down”. “It requires a bit of brain power and we’re sick of not doing anything competitive.”

Forget the tinkle of the sherry glass and grandma’s gentle bridge foursomes. Free-flowing, hard-betting poker is now the card game of choice, with the high-profile players to prove it such as Ricky Gervais, Nigella Lawson, Charles Saatchi, Robbie Williams and Stephen Fry.

Poker games at exclusive London clubs such as the Groucho and The Hospital are booming, while hotly contested tournaments with hundreds of players, such as the Grand in the Strand game in the disused Aldwych station, are springing up around the country.

The massively oversubscribed Hold ’Em 100 in west London — which raises funds for the Royal Marsden hospital — attracts a swathe of Notting Hill yuppies who take on top professionals such Joe “The Elegance” Beevers and Ram “The Looks” Vaswani.

In Hollywood, a gaggle of macho A-list stars hunker over the green baize night after night, with Brad Pitt taking on Elliott Gould, Matt Damon and Michael Douglas in breaks during the filming of Ocean’s Twelve, while Ben Affleck won the California State Poker Championship last June, pocketing £190,000.

Tobey Maguire, the innocent-looking Spider-Man star, has also won a leading tournament and holds regular games at his house with £1,000 required to get in.

Not just a new-found social acceptance, but also technology, is driving a wider surge in poker-playing. Britons staked £19m a day on internet poker last year, according to industry estimates, with online play doubling over the past 12 months. Outside the US, Britain is the world’s biggest market, with some estimates putting the number of online players as high as 150,000. This year Ladbrokes expects its online poker arm to take more than its internet betting arm, which covers horse-racing and football.

WHY is middle-class Britain racking out the chips, dealing ‘em up, raising, checking and folding? Part of the answer appears to be that while Cook and thousands like him might like to pretend they are Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid, they usually play a safe game among friends for relatively low stakes, neither betting their mortgage nor relying on it for their income.

Cook and his friends rarely win or lose more than £150 a piece, and there’s scant danger of chairs being thrown or debts going unpaid.

Conrad Brunner, who graduated from organising the Hold ’Em 100 to a job as marketing director of PokerStars.com, said: “The latest craze is definitely among professional middle-class people, and one reason is that it is so much more accessible now — five or six years ago it was hard to find a game in London where you needed less than £300.”

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