The last time I witnessed an event like the Stanford Super Series was two years ago in Las Vegas. The game was poker - heads-up hold 'em - and the venue was the Wynn Casino, a game and a place that exist solely because of money. Without money, poker is a pointless game. After all, how can you bluff without testing your opponent's cojones - his willingness to bet big? Gambling oils the wheels of Vegas and as for the Wynn Casino, the conspicuous consumption of its owner, Steve Wynn, makes Allen Stanford look something of a spendthrift.

There were a lot of similarities between the poker game in Vegas and the “twenny twenny for twenny” here in Coolidge, Antigua. For a start, one of the poker players was a Texan billionaire banker, a man called Steve Beal, and his opponents were a group of professionals, some of the best players in the world, who called themselves The Corporation. The stakes were familiar, too: $20 million (about £12.2 million), the only difference being that this was $20 million a day for six straight days.

In another similarity to this week, Beal's theory was to raise the stakes so high, to the point at which the professionals could not afford to lose, that it took them out of their comfort zones, so that their normal ice-cool decision-making would be skewed under pressure. And if there is a morbid fascination in watching the cricket here it is to see how cricketers cope with playing for life-changing sums. Creation of heroes is the marketing theme, but really the search is for the villain who cocks up when it matters.

There is one significant difference, though. Nobody in Vegas was under any illusion that this circus was about anything other than money. The chips - in denominations of $50,000 and $100,000, for goodness sake - were on the table for all to see and at the end of each day the reckoning would be done. It was a dull game to watch - Beal sat all day, every day, in shades, oblivious to the world around him - and the talk around the tables was simply of dollars, not the buzz or the tactics of the game itself. After all, heads-up hold 'em is to poker what Twenty20 is to cricket.

Times Archive, 1977: Cricket has nothing to fear from Mr Packer's 'circus'

Mr Kerry Packer would not divulge the salaries, but a report claimed each player would receive 37,000 dollars for the games

• Greig hoping for a compromise

• Leader: Responding to the Packer challenge

• Letters to the editor: Cricketers' right to earn

Related Links

• English cricket 'is one of Stanford's WAGs'

• Stanford keen to lap up attention

• Money shot cheapens the appeal of cricket

But here in Antigua there has been a curious reluctance from those involved to admit why they are here. Of the England players, only Alastair Cook, the least likely to be involved, has spoken of the true nature of this event. Meaningless, he said, without the cheque at the end of it all. He was not exactly slapped down by Peter Moores, the England head coach, for his honesty, but Moores was quick to paint a different picture: pride, the badge, honour and all that guff.

In his press conference before leaving for Antigua, even Kevin Pietersen, the captain, who is usually the least bashful of the players, warned his team not to clown around if they won the million bucks lest they be frowned upon at a time when the economy is collapsing.

This was an understandable and mature response, but one that has had the effect of making the players even more reticent to talk about the money. As the week has progressed, each press conference has been an exercise in concocting ever more ridiculous justifications for being here. “Good preparation for a big winter of cricket” being just about the craziest of all.

There is one other difference. The poker game between Beal and The Corporation has been going on for years. I'd lay a very large wager - not perhaps large enough to get a place at Beal's table, but a large one nevertheless - that the Stanford Super Series will be a one-off event.

I understand that the ECB has been horrified by the nature of the coverage it has generated and by the reaction back home. As reluctant as the players are to acknowledge the real reasons for being here, Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, continues to insist that the prime reason for signing a five-year deal with Stanford was charity: to help the West Indies Cricket Board out of its financial problems and to roll out the Chance to Shine campaign (cricket in schools) throughout the Caribbean. One man's charity, though, has become another man's ego trip.

If some good comes out of this week, it will be that the Stanford Series will force us to re-examine the meaning of sport. Because when you stop and think about it, when you look beyond the grand titles, the personalised helicopters, the crates of cash, the fawning ECB executives and all the hype, this week goes to the heart of what watching sport is all about. It asks the most fundamental questions of this circus, with which some of us have been involved for all our adult lives.

What is the point of it all?

Why do media moguls spend millions, sometimes a billion, hoovering up sports rights? Why will the Sports Editor of this newspaper send his minions forth to every corner of the world this winter, at enormous expense, to file dispatches? Why do you, the supporters, shell out sometimes vast sums, sometimes small, to follow your team? Why will sport endure long after more vacuous forms of entertainment wither on the vine?

Because it matters. Deep down we know that sport is important only because it is totally unimportant when compared with the grim news that greets us on a daily basis. But we realise that for each and every sportsman of note, they undergo, albeit unconsciously, a daily willing suspension of disbelief. They may talk of keeping it all in perspective, but for the time span of the competition, what they are engaged in is the most important thing in the world to them. It is, as George Orwell observed, war minus the shooting - sport's greatest justification; a kind of playground for grown-ups to blow off steam.

If it doesn't matter, why the nerves? Why did Michael Vaughan spend the morning of the last day of the 2005 Ashes series secretly wanting to throw up? Why the sleepless nights? Why did I once bump into Nasser Hussain, wandering around an hotel in Galle in the dead of night, fretting about his form? Why the trauma? Why did the colour drain from Stephen Harmison's face when his first ball in Brisbane ended up in second slip's hands and why did it take him almost two years to recover? Why the reaction? Why did thousands of people line the streets when England won the Ashes? Because it matters.

Stanford doesn't get this bit, which is why his Super Series is unlikely to endure. It matters all right in the sense that, like all entrepreneurs, he can smell a magnificent opportunity. But the sport itself, he doesn't really get. This is cricket as wrestling - mere entertainment. But sport, as Bill Shankly might have said, is more important than that.

Dazzled by the glare from Stanford's crate of dollars at Lord's in June, the ECB was blind to it, too. Nobody gives a stuff whether England win or lose on Saturday and Pietersen came close to admitting it on Tuesday when he said that he “just wanted to get the thing over with”. Once the money has been won or lost, the players won't give the fixture a moment's thought.

Nor should we - except to remember that international sport is more than just about pocketing the dough. Poker is only about money, but as we all know, poker is not a sport. Come to think of it, the Stanford Super Series isn't like that poker game I watched in Vegas at all: this is poker without money; sport without meaning.