ELIZABETH KURZ is a 28-year-old interior designer with a steady boyfriend. Shirley Carnett is a 64-year-old grandmother who answers phones for her husband's chimney sweeping service. Jenny Kleid is a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom who drives her kids to soccer practice in a hulking white Ford Expedition.

Spanning a demographic spectrum that would make a marketer's head spin, these women, unbelievably, have something in common. That something is online poker, and due to a prevalance of low-stakes or no-stakes gambling options, it is quickly becoming the most appealing way for women to join the current poker craze.

The poker bandwagon is anything but unobtrusive. It's a virtual flatbed truck traveling in a parade down our nation's cultural main street, decorated with streamers and flashing lights and hauling a load of sunglasses-wearing card sharks whose reference to a Steel Wheel has nothing whatsoever to do with the tires beneath them.

Women have joined that bandwagon. Professionally speaking, Jennifer Harman Traniello is not only the 10th-ranked player in Bluff, a poker magazine, but she's also a bobblehead doll. The unprofessional ranks are ever-expanding as well, and it's a phenomenon that's happening online. Whether on

PartyPoker.com, PokerShare.com or

PokerRoom.com, women are playing, and often.

"Yep, I was playing," says Carnett, the grandmother, who couldn't be reached at her Placerville home via telephone until she was called on another line and asked to log off from her poker game. "I start at 6:30 in the morning, play until 11 or 12 when I take a break and make my husband lunch, and then get back on the computer and play until my husband gets home from work. I just love it."

Carnett, aka ShirCarn online, estimates she spends eight hours a day playing poker at no-stakes tables using fake money. Kurz, the interior designer, averages at the very least an hour at night playing low-stakes poker at her Sherman Oaks home -- but that's probably a gross understatement because she feared her mother might read about her habit in the newspaper.

Kleid, a mother of three in Atlanta, says she goes online to the lower-stakes tables after her children's bedtime -- but sometimes stops for a quick hit after seeing them off at the bus stop. She's been known to stay up until 2 a.m. on her wireless laptop, making White Meat (poker slang for profit) from the comfort of 600-thread- count Egyptian cotton sheets.