LAS VEGAS -- It's a weekday afternoon in the poker room at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, and something strange is going on: It's packed.

The 30 tables wedged into a far corner of the casino are filled, mostly with young and middle-aged men clicking chips and shuffling cards, as a line of people waiting to ante up spills out the door.

"The game has been revived," said Bill Thompson, a public administration professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of a gambling encyclopedia. "Until the last four or five years, (poker) had sort of been an old man's game for Friday nights."

But thanks to televised tournaments and a handful of celebrity card players lending glamour to the game, poker has exploded into popular culture -- forcing Vegas casinos to jump on the bandwagon.

Caesars Palace is expected to announce plans to open its first poker room in more than a decade. The MGM Grand will reopen its poker room -- closed for years -- in late March. Bally's unveiled new poker tables this summer, and the Mirage added seven more tables to the 24 it had. Several other casinos on the Strip are considering expanding their poker operations or creating new ones.

"You can't find a casino in Vegas that isn't scrambling to open up a poker room in order to get people in it," said Steven Lipscomb, creator of the televised World Poker Tour and president of WPT Enterprises.

Most players deal in Texas hold 'em, seven-card stud or Omaha, with bets starting at a few dollars and reaching thousands of dollars.

To make money off poker, a game where the players are competing against one another, the casinos skim a percentage of a table's winnings, charge a fee per hand or, in higher-stakes games, charge for the time a table is used.

And it's a safe bet that some poker players will wander into the craps and blackjack pits -- pouring easy money into casino coffers -- when they're not holding out for the next flush.

"It's such a popular game right now; it's driving a lot of patrons into these properties," said Dennis Neilander, chairman of the Nevada gaming control board.

As the game favored by cowboys and World War II soldiers faded in popularity, many casinos folded their poker rooms in the 1990s, replacing them with more lucrative slot machines, Thompson said.

But the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker --where regular-guy amateurs have taken home championship millions -- and Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown" have hooked a new, younger viewing audience on the classic card game. The WPT's "Battle of Champions," which aired on NBC in February, drew an estimated 10 million viewers.

"It just exploded," said Jack McClelland, poker tournament director at the Bellagio and a 28-year industry veteran. Lipscomb described the game's renaissance as a "social phenomenon."