Despite the law against online gambling, officials in Hawaii and five other states fail to prosecute offenders. Hawaiians have been able to wager thousands of dollars in poker tournaments and other games of chance without fear of arrest.

In the Dodds family, traditional board games have gone the way of the dinosaur, and been replaced with one of the hottest new trends: Poker. Once the activity of smoky, back-door clubs and casinos, family participation requires some easy-to-use new inventions, including the DB Dealer, which combines the game's dealer button -- an oversized, round chip marker that denotes which player bets last, the most advantageous betting position -- and the blind timer, an alarm that marks a minimum bet increase, called a blind.

A Seattle entrepreneur says he's found an inexpensive, highly visible tool to plug his website- an innovation he calls "bum-vertising. "Ben Rogovy, a 22-year-old University of Washington graduate, sees the homeless and panhandlers as an untapped labor force, which he says he's putting to work.