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Perils of poker Big game on campus spurs concern about gambling addiction By Abe Aamidor Saturday, October 16, 2004 Copyright
© 2004, The most popular subject in college these days may be Poker 101. Don't believe it? "I didn't even play poker in my freshman year," said Ryan Goldschmidt, a 21-year-old senior at Indiana University. "Now I have 40 friends that I could play with almost nightly." From Bloomington to West Lafayette, and all across the country, the latest rage on campus is poker. Yet psychologists and counselors worry that a new generation of gambling addicts is being created. They blame the emergence of televised poker tournaments on ESPN, The Travel Channel and Bravo in large measure for the surge in the game's popularity, including among young people. Recent articles in student newspapers from Penn State to Miami University of Ohio to the University of California at Berkeley all confirm the trend among college-age youth. James A. Beitman, a nationally certified gambling counselor at Fairbanks Hospital, says young men in particular enjoy the camaraderie of a live poker game, but also the lure of easy money and the chance to crow about how good they are. "It's exciting. It's a rush. It's drug-free," said Beitman. "They think it's skill and accomplishment and their cleverness." Experts say it can take years for a gambling addiction to manifest itself, but that 1 in 20 people who gamble regularly will become addicted. Overall, at least 3 million people in America are believed to be addicted to gambling in one form or another. Poker is a particularly insidious form of gambling because people often start playing the game at a young age, and many parents think it's harmless recreation as long as the stakes are low. A paper recently presented before a meeting of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry reported that 85 percent of parents approve of their children gambling, so long as it's restricted to bingo, "casino night" fund-raisers or penny ante games with friends at home. Yet pathological gambling can express itself in adolescents as young as 10 years of age, says Dr. Paul D. Riley, chief of psychiatry at St. Vincent Hospitals. Goes for big money Roger G. Teska, a 19-year-old sophomore at IU, says he began playing poker in earnest during his freshman year, while living in a dormitory. He could find a game somewhere on campus almost every night, he says. "Everybody just started playing for a little more money and a little more money, and I was starting to lose money," said Teska. "I thought, 'This is not a good thing.' " Instead of quitting, though, he began reading up on the game and studying the habits of professional players on those cable TV shows. Teska says he's well on his way to mastering the game. He now plays in high-stakes games in Bloomington with as much as a $500 "buy-in," and also online; Teska says he is paying his way through college now with his winnings. But there is an additional cost. Cuts into studies "It takes away from some of my study time," conceded Teska, who nonetheless does not believe he has a problem with poker. "A lot of time we'll be up until 4, 5, 6 o'clock in the morning and we'll have 8 o'clock classes." Poker games are not hard to find in Bloomington, an array of students told The Star. Even the IU Union Board has been hosting a so-called "Campus Series of Poker" Friday evenings at the IU Memorial Union this semester; the event is totally free, however. "Why? With all the recent buzz about poker, what could be better than finding out who is the best poker player at Indiana University?" says a blurb on the Union Board's Web site. The picture is pretty much the same at Purdue. Poker's popularity is "indeed rising" on campus, says Timothy C. Jones, president of the Interfraternity Council at the school, who calls himself a recreational player. "Poker seems to be a fad these days, highly due to the amount of media coverage it receives," Jones said. Steve Rosenberg, an 18-year-old freshman at IU, won $1,500 after making a $20 "donation" at a poker tournament held in the Bloomington/Monroe County Convention Center in early September. Rosenberg says he's been playing for four years and has studied the game in depth; he also stays away from high-stakes games or those with large "buy-ins," which basically are minimum amounts of money required to get a seat at the table. Social appeal The main attraction for Rosenberg is social -- he much prefers live games to online gambling, for example. Rosenberg does not believe he is personally at risk for a gambling addiction, but he says he knows other students who are in denial about their habit. "I met a kid here who said he had gambling problems when he was back home," Rosenberg said. "Then he bet on a game and he won. I saw him again, and he said, 'Yo, I'm up $300.' I said 'I thought you quit.' " Between 6 percent and 12 percent of 18- to 20-year-olds are addicted to gambling, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. The International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors at McGill University in Montreal puts the figure for young people overall at 4 to 8 percent. "Kids have double the rate of gambling problems as adults," said Keith S. Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. "The earlier you start gambling, the more likely you are to have problems with gambling later in life." "Under-diagnosed problem" Nancy Stockton, director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the IU Health Center in Bloomington, calls student gambling an "under-diagnosed problem." "It operates like any other addiction," Stockton said. "They start cutting classes and canceling social engagements. It takes over." Rick Barnes, a former administrator at Texas Christian University who speaks on student drinking and gambling addictions, says colleges are just beginning to become aware of the gambling problem. "I don't think we've studied poker on the college scene nearly enough," Barnes said. Part of the reason some people don't believe gambling can be addictive is because it's a behavior -- people aren't consuming something inside their bodies, such as alcohol, drugs or food. But St. Vincent's Paul Riley says gambling addictions are like other addictions in that they involve changes in brain chemistry in the affected person. The progression of the behavior unfolds in four stages, he says. • Fun; you do it as a social activity. Sherwin Barclay is a 54-year-old ex-human resources director and Anderson University graduate who says a gambling addiction devastated him. For Barclay, it was riverboat gambling, slot machines and blackjack. "I'd have thousands of dollars on me," said Barclay. "I had my jackpot when I went on the boat, yet I went on the boat to win my jackpot." The bottom came when he lost his job, then took out a mortgage on a home he had inherited debt-free. He frittered away all the money. Abstain from the game Now, Barclay calls himself a recovering compulsive gambler; he's been "in abstinence" for four years, he says. Besides televised poker tournaments, the burgeoning popularity of online poker also appears to have seduced many college students. "If you were to walk down the halls of a fraternity, you'd find four or five people playing poker, whereas a year ago, they would have all been playing video games," said IU's Goldschmidt. Most online poker sites offer "free" games as well as real-time, for-cash games. (In the latter, players deposit money upfront in online accounts.) Goldschmidt says most students he knows who play online visit the free sites, but that some inevitably graduate to the real thing. Online poker is a $1.2 billion industry annually, according to PokerPulse.com, which monitors the online gaming industry. Addiction counselors consider online poker particularly dangerous because hands are dealt much faster than in a "live game," meaning you can lose money faster, and because it's very much an anti-social activity -- you're not playing with good friends around a table, but are all alone, staring into a computer monitor, for hours on end. "When people start to get into trouble playing poker, it's when they're online," said Nick Fredman, a 21-year-old senior at IU. "They're throwing down 50, 100 dollars a day." Fredman says he began playing in January, and typically only sits down at tables with a $5 or $10 buy-in. He plays in one tournament every Tuesday night in a Bloomington apartment that typically attracts about 30 people, he says, but adds that he could find a game every night of the week if he wanted to.
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