Poker is a card game, the most popular of a class of games called vying games, in which players with fully or partially concealed cards make wagers into a central pot, after which the pot is awarded to the remaining player or players with the best combination of cards.

In 2003 she recorded her first album, entitled Metamorphosis, which was released on August 26 and went to number one on the US and Canadian charts in that year (see 2003 in music). The Metamorphosis album featured music that would appeal to teenagers as well as the tweens who had supported her to date. The Matrix, who had worked with singers such as Avril Lavigne on her Let Go album and Liz Phair, provided three songs on the album. One of these songs, So Yesterday, was released as the first single, reaching number 2 in Canada, top 40 in Australia and just outside the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.

The 1990s and 2000s saw the increased acceptance of anime in overseas markets. Cowboy Bebop was widely popular in Japan and attracted attention in the West. Spirited Away shared the first prize at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, and Innocence: Ghost in the Shell was featured at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Poker is a microcosm of all we admire and disdain about capitalism and democracy. It can be rough-hewn or polished, warm or cold, charitable and caring or hard and impersonal. It is fickle and elusive, but ultimately it is fair, and right, and just. -- Lou Krieger

Modern tournament play became popular in American casinos after the World Series of Poker began in 1970. It was also during that decade that the first serious strategy books appeared, notably The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky (ISBN 1880685000), Super System by Doyle Brunson (ISBN 0931444014), and The Book of Tells by Mike Caro (ISBN 0897461002). Broadcast of poker tournaments for cable and satellite TV distribution, such as with the World Poker Tour, has added additional popularity to the game, as has the introduction of online poker.

Around the same time, Lauryn Galindo, the Hawaii-based adoption facilitator whose services Jolie had used to adopt Maddox, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to visa fraud and money laundering charges. She had been falsifying records of children to be adopted in visa applications to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and several of the children she placed had not been abandoned at all but were enticed away or bought from their birth families. It does not appear that Maddox was among them, although the investigation is continuing.