By Corey Kilgannon

The next big thing in sports programming is ... dominoes?

To the occasional domino player, it is a stretch to even call this quiet game of straight-faced strategy a sport. But anyone who has spent time in a Latino neighborhood in New York City could testify that dominoes played there — with the slammed-down tiles, the verbal sparring, the bragging and bluffing — is no parlor game.

From the opening bid, a simple sidewalk match will quickly escalate into a raucous, freewheeling spectacle: a mini-fiesta where salsa and cigars, Bacardi and brown-bagged beers have as much a role as the little colored tiles with dots.

The games almost always draw spectators, so perhaps it is no surprise that the ESPN sports network has declared dominoes the next big spectator sport and is promoting it as both a colorful cultural touchstone and a highly competitive game, complete with rankings, formal tournaments, celebrity events and sponsors.

Encouraged by the success of televised poker, the network has begun combing New York City for top players and colorful clubs for its coverage, and has been taping segments on formal tournaments and casual neighborhood games.

Hourlong domino shows now run on Tuesday nights at 10 on the network's Spanish-language sports channel ESPN Deportes. Hoping it will be popular with English-speaking viewers, network officials plan to show similar programming on ESPN2 starting in June.

"We think it will be the next cool thing," said Lino Garcia, the general manager of ESPN Deportes. "We're connecting with the best places dominoes is played, so naturally we're going to start in uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, the places where it really happens."

Mr. Garcia said he hopes to repeat the success the network has had with poker — its World Series of Poker is its highest-rated regular series. Like poker, domino games offer plenty of suspense and drama at the table, with clever decision-making and reading the strategies of other players all pivotal to winning. The network will also televise the world championships next year from the Dominican Republic.

The plan, Mr. Garcia said, is not only to present dominoes in world-class tournaments and flashy celebrity domino events the way the network showcases poker, but also to capture the excitement and charm of "the highly energetic games on street corners and small clubs in basements where guys go every day."

New York's neighborhoods are filled with characters who come together to play on Spanish Harlem sidewalks, Bronx parks and in basement and backroom clubs in Washington Heights. Older men in caps and young men in muscle-T's and gold chains go at it, slapping dominoes onto flimsy tables, speaking in Spanish in games lubricated by Presidente beer and salsa music.

This was the scene recently at a dominoes club in the Bronx called Hijos y Amigos de Altamira, which means children and friends of Altamira, a town in the Dominican Republic. Housed in rented space above a bar on Westchester Avenue, the club, which is one of those being scouted by ESPN, is a band of countrymen — almost every member is from Altamira, a small town that prides itself on its crop of baseball and domino players.

"I've been playing dominoes all my life, but I never thought I'd see it on TV," said Augusto Montan, 55, one of the club's members. "We always thought of it as a game to pass the time, but it does have all the elements people love: the competition, the trash-talking, the color, and it's old school."

The club embodies exactly what ESPN is looking for in a neighborhood domino setting. Young and old men alike sat at domino tables and shuffled a mess of face-down tiles and then picked their domino hands. Members have nicknames like el Natural. Their wives, girlfriends and daughters play bingo and tend to the homemade Dominican food and serve $2 beers from a small bar. The children race around, practicing traditional Latin dance steps and gathering at tables to watch, learn and root.

"Dominoes is the national pastime of Dominican Republic: it's as simple as that," said one club member, Louis Keyser, 72. "Over there, a little kid gets a bat and ball put in his hand as soon as he can walk, and from the moment he's tall enough to see the table, he learns how to play dominoes."

The club's origins go back to 1983, when a handful of men began a regular domino game in the basement of a Bronx apartment building where one of them, Juan Martinez, was the superintendent.

There are now 42 members, mostly from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Dues are $10 a month, and through fund-raising events and contributions the club collects enough money to help members with needs ranging from rent or funeral costs for family members.

Dominoes, which some experts date to ancient Egypt, is played worldwide, and in New York it is popular in African-American, Chinese and Caribbean neighborhoods. But Hispanic players like to stake a claim that the game is truly theirs. Styles of dominoes vary by country — Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for example, generally use seven tiles per player, while Cubans tend to and use nine pieces. Instead of players taking turns making moves in the usual clockwise rotation, some Latin players take turns counter-clockwise.

While the game's basic objective is simple enough — to get rid of one's tiles first by placing them next to tiles of matching dots on the table — the best players are expert at using memory counting to calculate what tiles an opponent is likely to be holding.

Luis Guzman, the well-known Puerto Rican actor, said in an interview that the domino table was an arena where the very dramas of life play out: love, hatred, revenge. Tempers can flare and lifelong relationships can begin and end around a domino game.

Mr. Guzman recalled that when he grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it seemed that every male Latino played dominoes.

"My pops would play for hours on end; all the men did," he said. "I know best friends who stopped talking to each other for years because of one game. After 10 years, one would still be saying, 'Man, why'd he play that one when he knew the other guy was holding the 6-3?' I know a guy who jumped out a second-story window and broke both legs after losing a domino game.' "

At the Altamira Club, the players had varying opinions about how old-school domino players accustomed to casual, free-flowing action would react to being analyzed and scrutinized by ESPN, which plans on installing a dozen table-level cameras, along with others overhead and around the club.

"I think being on TV would make some of our players nervous," said Mr. Montan, "but then again, I could name at least few guys right now who would eat it up."