If it wasn’t for poker, the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba would not have been solved.

According to media reports about the case, Patrick van der Eem, the man who tricked Dutch student Joran van der Sloot into confessing his involvement in the disappearance, met the student at a Dutch casino where both of them had gone to play poker.

After meeting, van der Eem hatched a plot to befriend van der Sloot, gain his trust and trick a confession out of him.

With the help of a Dutch television reporter, van der Eem rigged a sport utility vehicle with hidden cameras and microphones, then lured van der Sloot into the vehicle.

During a long drive, van der Eem questioned van der Sloot about Holloway’s 2005 disappearance from Aruba during a high school graduation trip, a disappearance for which van der Sloot had been suspected of being involved in, but which nothing had been proven.

With hidden cameras and mikes rolling, van der Sloot confessed that he was with Holloway on an Aruban beach when she died, and panicking, he arranged for a friend to take the body out to sea in a boat and dump it overboard.

The hidden camera footage with van der Sloot’s shocking confession was shown on Dutch television last week, and then on TV in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Afterwards, legal experts predicted the confession will be admissable in court and said they expected van der Sloot to be arrested, tried and convicted, in connection with Holloway’s death.

All because two gamblers met at a poker game.

Amazingly, poker often has a way of showing up when a crime, like the Holloway disappearance, captures world headlines.

When a crazed Korean guman gunned down students and faculty at Virginia Tech, an American university, last year, it was revealed that before the shooting, the gunman had penned a play about video poker.

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