I've been sitting at this table for three hours, playing Texas Hold 'Em no-limit poker. I started with 10,000. I've still got 7,000 left, but the blinds are up to 500 and 1,000 — unavoidable bets that rotate around the table — and they're coming my way. I won't last much longer unless I take a stand. Unless I take a lot of stands. The president of the Screen Actors Guild, Alan Rosenberg, is sitting next to me, his giant stack of chips providing a fair amount of shade. Two cards slide my way across the felt: ace and seven of clubs. As good a hand as any.

''All in.''

Before I left for the Sundance Film Festival, I got a press release, one of hundreds, informing me of a celebrity poker tournament to be held on Sunday, January 21. It was a charity affair, hosted by legendary poker poobah Doyle Brunson, to benefit Operation Smile, which pays for facial reconstruction surgeries for kids with deformities. And Lance Bass and Reichen whatever-the-heck-his-last-name-is would be there. They were looking for coverage; I was looking to play poker. Everybody wins.

When I got to the ''Sundance Escape House,'' a cavernous mansion nestled in the hills above Park City which had been host to a great many parties during the festival (including a Nick Cannon jammy-jam to celebrate his movie, Weapons, which premiered at the fest), I was a little hung over. And I use the word little in the same way that you call a 6-foot-10, 400-lb. man ''Slim.'' EW's Sundance party was the night before and let's just say I failed the bar exam. I never passed the bar, not without stopping.

Anyway, as I stood there woozily nursing an Evian, celebs and pseudo-celebs started trickling in. The dude from The Office who plays Pam's ex-fiancé, Roy (I saw that guy, like, 23 times during Sundance, and just kept referring to him as Roy). Lance and Reichen, looking chummy and impossibly radiant. Mathew St. Patrick, a.k.a. Keith, from Six Feet Under (who is really into the bone-crushing handshake. Luckily, I am made of granite. Drunken granite.) Jamie Gold, the winner of the 2006 World Series of Poker. David Moscow, who may or may not be on the CBS show Numbers (and I refuse to spell it with the stupid ''3'' instead of the ''e''). Danny Masterson, who had a Slamdance film to promote (but no, I don't know what it is. I am not a flack for The Man.). And lots of Budweiser Select, the finest brew ever created for human consumption.

There were four tables, each emblazoned with the logo for Doyle Brunson's online poker site. After we made our buy-ins of at least $250 (I thought about playing the ''Hey, I'm a journalist, you can't expect me to pay to give you coverage'' card, until I remembered the kids who couldn't smile and pulled out my corporate card...charity, I always say, begins at the office), we were assigned tables. Joining me at table 2 were SAG honcho Rosenberg, film critic Richard Roeper, Mitch Davis (son of music mogul Clive Davis), Access Hollywood correspondent Jamal Munnerlyn, a music manager named ''DJ,'' and Todd Brunson, Doyle's son, who knows a thing or fourteen about poker, having been raised by the guy who wrote the book on it. (Literally; this function was also being used to promote Doyle Brunson's Super System 2, a sequel to his original poker bible.)

Seats were taken, chips were distributed, and the cards were dealt. And I did pretty well. Took down a few pots, bluffed a few hands, and doubled up once or twice on a few All-In hands, where I bet everything I had. (My favorite was with a pair of kings, which beat a pair of queens.) The blinds, which started at 25 and 50, doubled every half-hour or so. Slowly, people began to drop out. Roeper went first; I'm not sure if he got beat on a legitimate hand or if he took a dive, knowing he had a party to host and had to bail. Then Mitch Davis, followed by Jamal and some Internet-looking dude (never got his name, though I did get some of his chips). Since this was an elimination tournament, when our table was thin enough, they consolidated us, and we got some real celebs: Lance, Reichen, and that Numbers dude.

But I never got to play a hand with them, because I got my Ace-Seven of clubs and went all in. I didn't win. While I flopped two clubs, and was in pretty good position to make my flush before the river, the fifth club never materialized. I was done. While I didn't make the final table, I was able to take solace in three things: 1) I was not the first guy eliminated (sit and spin, Roeper!); 2) I lasted longer than the World Series of Poker champion; and 3) the guy who beat me on that final hand, SAG's Alan Rosenberg, went on to win the whole shebang.

Plus, I was done early enough to catch the last quarter of the Pats-Colts game, which made that the best Sunday I've had in a while.