WHEN IT COMES TO LATE-NIGHT TV viewing, you can pick your vice. On NBC, there’s Poker After Dark. On Cinemax, there’s Lingerie. Tying them together is Jennifer Korbin, the star of Lingerie, who got her poker education at an early age.

“I started playing when I was a kid,” she told ALL IN, “and I was actually pretty good. I learned it from friends when I was a teenager. We weren’t playing strip poker, I’ll tell you that much. Texas Hold ’Em was one we played a lot.”

It was fitting that she learned poker by playing one of the Lone Star State’s greatest exports. She was, after all, born and raised in Dallas.

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Growing up in a family full of boys motivated her to attend Stuart Hall, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia. The environment suited her so well she decided to replicate the experience in college, choosing Texas Woman’s University in Denton. That doesn’t mean she shunned men. When she wasn’t studying, she was hanging out at North Texas University.

“When I was in class, I was focusing on my work,” she explained, “but we were like a mile away from one of the biggest party schools in Texas.”

This work-hard, play-hard attitude served her well. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and criminal justice and enjoyed plenty of good times in the process.

After graduating in 1999, she was approached in a Dallas nightclub by a Hawaiian Tropic pageant director who convinced her to enter a regional competition at Lake Texoma. After winning the event, she headed to Las Vegas for the nationals. There she met Mark Daughn, who asked her to pose for his magazine Mystique. This job and a subsequent move to Los Angeles helped launch her career in television, including appearances on Suddenly Susan, The Man Show, and West Wing.

But what you see on the screen is only part of who she is. Offscreen, she’s a huge animal rights activist.

“I’ve always had a connection with animals,” she explained. “My brothers are so much older than me that when they moved out, I was a little kid and all I really had were my pets.”

When she was 21, the fiery redhead found the love of her life, and it will give you a boost of confidence to discover that he had a hairy back and bad breath. She found the dog at a rescue shelter and named him “Major Thomas Rose,” an amalgamation of “Major Rose,” the Civil War officer who owned the mansion her father turned into a bed and breakfast, and “Major Tom,” a character from her favorite song. Her dog died of lymphoma in 2005, but his influence on her remains strong. She’s an avid supporter of In Defense of Animals.

When this sultry vixen isn’t filming her TV show in Toronto, she often makes trips to Las Vegas where she enjoys watching others play poker, although “she can’t stand watching it on TV.” But she obviously watches enough to know what’s what in the poker world. When pressed to predict who will win the Main Event, she picked Phil Ivey. That’s almost as smart a choice as stopping on Cinemax late at night and checking out Jennifer Korbin in Lingerie.