Howard Lederer offers the polite version of why poker players should leave their shades at home.

Here's the blunt version. You look ridiculous.

I haven't been watching televised poker tournaments for long but already the sight of some chinless wonder with acne lurking behind sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled as low as it can feasibly go is adding a clownish note to what is otherwise great theatre.

It's a game, for crying out loud, not espionage. They weren't that furtive at Checkpoint Charlie.

What's more, it's a game whose drama relies largely on interaction. Put a bunch of human cocoons around a table, insulated from each other and their audience by polarised lenses and headphones and in the medium- to long-term you can kiss a chunk of your TV figures goodbye.

There are calls to ban any kind of headgear at poker tournaments and I endorse them wholeheartedly. Top tennis players have to disguise their drop-shot; fast bowlers or baseball pitchers have to mask their slower ball. Any poker player who can't disguise his emotions without artificial aids should probably stick to blackjack.

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Whatever stretchings of the imagination were called for by the script, at least last night's episode of 'Hustle' on BBC1 left poker largely unbruised.

Attempting to bleed a poker player dry in a ring game set-up, in order to compensate his ex-wife whose finances he had drained when walking out on her, the team of Robin Hood con-men even provided an explanation of Hold'em rules for the benefit of their audience.

Not always the quickest on the uptake where fast-moving TV dramas are concerned, I'm still trying to work out whether the team's poker expert was being deliberately stupid as to the meaning of the term 'nut straight' but this paled into insignificance alongside the proposition that one of his colleagues would manage to sell the villain's Dutch apartment behind his back, while learning the language on the hoof from a Dutch phrasebook. Apart from anything else, I'm yet to meet a Dutch adult whose English isn't better than my own.

As they say in showbiz, pur...leeze...