BY TOM SOMACH

High-stakes home poker games can be profitable not just for the players, but, it seems, for the criminals too.

In the latest of what can only be described as a “rash” of recent home poker game robberies across the U.S., police in Salt Lake City, Utah, are investigating the armed robbery of a high-stakes poker game.

According to media reports out of Utah, a group of about a half-dozen friends told police that they were waiting to leave for a trip to Las Vegas and had gathered at one friend’s home for a few hands of poker before the trip, at about 5 a.m. Tuesday.

The victims told police that during the game, three armed black men wearing Halloween-type skeleton costumes burst in and demanded money, media reports said.

One bandit had a gun, the other two had knives and they stole almost $20,000 in cash, the victims told police, according to the media reports.

No one was injured in the robbery, the reports said.

As the popularity of tournament poker, televised poker and online poker all explode, so does the popularity of home game poker, which unfortunately has lead to a sharp increase in home game poker robberies, by bandits looking to make an easy score on unprotected card players with huge cash piles in front of them.

About two weeks ago, an armed robbery of a home poker game near Indianapolis, Indiana, saw a poker player get shot and wounded, after he scuffled with one of the gunmen pulling the robbery.

A day later, another home poker game, this one in Ashburn, Virginia, was robbed by gun-toting bandits, although no one was injured in that incident.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)