Poker crossword puzzle

Many issues of Poker Player newspaper contain a poker-themed crossword puzzle of sorts, but they're all terribly lame. Instead of the solid blocks of spaces to be filled in the way you see in professionally constructed puzzles, the ones in PPN are just individual words that happen to cross at a few points. They're so stupid that it's never worth the time to try to solve them.

Yesterday I was reading this week's issue and was bowled over to see an actual, standard-issue, professional-looking crossword puzzle. It was constructed by Michael Wiesenberg, a columnist for Card Player magazine and author of the best poker dictionary to date. It follows classic puzzle rules about blocks of open squares, symmetry, no two-letter words, etc. (There is one dodgy spelling that they sneak in as an answer, but I'm so otherwise ecstatic to see this thing that I'm giving them a pass on it.) Of the 128 clues, 29 pertain to poker--not an easy feat to pull off.

It's still a fairly easy puzzle to solve; I could almost, though not quite, do it using only the horizontal clues.

You can see a typical example of the worthless kind of puzzle they usually print by going to http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/back-issues/currentissue.pdf today; the "current issue" there, which always lags behind the print version, is the July 20 issue, and the puzzle is on page 20. Soon, though, this will be replaced by the August 3 issue, and if you don't otherwise have access to PPN, you'll be able to print out and work the good puzzle that way. I recommend it.

More of these, please, PPN!