DAVENPORT -- It wasn't all that long ago that former Illinois state Sen. Denny Jacobs used to play poker with President-elect Barack Obama when the two were state legislators.

Well, if Jacobs wants to get a ticket to see his old poker pal take the oath of office as 44th president of the United States, he may have to count on a lucky draw.

Tickets for the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of the country's first African-American president are hot items, with interest in the historic event sky-high.

In Iowa and Illinois, there's a special interest in being there.

Illinois, of course, is Obama's home state, and Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses put him on the road to the White House.

Jacobs, who lives in East Moline, said he's submitted a request for tickets. Now, he has to wait.

"It sure would be nice to know our congressman took care of us," he said hopefully.

Tickets are being distributed through the country's 535 congressional offices. And they're being bombarded with requests.

The spokesmen for U.S. Reps. Phil Hare, D-Ill., and Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, said last week they've gotten requests for 500 tickets apiece.

"We don't know how many tickets we're going to get. We don't know when we're going to get them. We do know they're free," said Jeff Giertz, Braley's spokesman. "Inauguration tickets are very popular."

They're so popular that the tickets were being offered on eBay for a time, some for thousands of dollars, even though none has been disbursed yet. eBay put a stop to the practice late last week.

"We have received thousands of requests to date," said Jennifer Mullin, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, which is in charge of arrangements, hasn't yet announced how many of the 240,000 tickets will be allotted to each congressional office.

Also, they won't be handed out to the offices until the week before the inauguration, the committee's Web site says.

The Washington Post reported last week that in 2005 each House office got about 200 tickets to hand out for President Bush's second inauguration, with the White House getting 60,000 tickets.

Disbursement of the tickets is at the discretion of the congressional offices, and it isn't clear on what basis they'll be given out. The congressional offices contacted for this article said they hadn't decided how to distribute them yet.

"It'll be up to him," said Tim Schlittner, the spokesman for Hare.

Giertz said once they find out how many tickets they get and match it with the requests, they will make a decision on how to give the tickets out. He said they would go to people in the district.

Mullin said Harkin's office will likely use a lottery system to decide.

Dennis Ahern, a Moline, Ill. man who was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, said he had heard unconfirmed reports that delegates would get tickets. He said he would like to go, but if not, he was comforted by the knowledge that he already had a part in history.

Jacobs said he was planning on going, either way. He and some friends and family booked a hotel room for $700 a night (minimum three-night stay) a few weeks ago.

"We're pretty much able to make our own party if we have to," he quipped.

Still, he's hopeful. But he already knows that he won't get the kind of seat he got in 1996, when he attended the inauguration of Bill Clinton on the viewing stand as the guest of former U.S. Rep. Lane Evans. "That's one I can't duplicate," he said.

Contact Ed Tibbetts at (563) 383-2327 or etibbetts@qctimes.com.