The world of professional poker is fascinating at the best of times, and there's been crossover into poker from other geek worlds before - David Kushner's excellent book Jonny Magic & The Card Shark Kids is subtitled "How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas", and deals with Magic: The Gathering players' poker success.

But now Shoryuken.com is trumpeting large that fighting game player Hevad 'Rain' Khan has made the final table at the gigantic World Series Of Poker in Las Vegas. Looks like Khan has played both fighting games and Starcraft at high levels, actually - one report indicates he was clocked playing Starcraft at 500 apm's (actions per minute), and he plays 26 tables at once in online poker.

Also, there's a great quote from Khan in an MSNBC article: "We’ve kind of found a way to mold our adolescence of thriving through video game competition into poker. So it’s competitive, but we can still be kids and we can still live our lives, kind of be animals in a way. At the same time we can make so much money that we can become independent."

Mind you, poker site Bodog thinks the video game angle is less interesting than the craziness angle: "Khan's skill is the least interesting thing about him. The real story here seems to be that Khan is insane. He recently knocked out Adam White to take the chip lead. As soon as he won the hand he screamed and put his chair on his head and said, "Do you like my new hat? Does it look good?"" Either way, there's probably some good articles/books in this.