Saturday, January 27, 2007

Jay Melancon hunkered down in an auditorium chair for his morning psychology
class at the University of Minnesota, flipped open his laptop and logged on.
The instructor yammered on at the front of the room, but Melancon wasn't
listening. He was exhausted from staying up all night playing online poker.
And now, sitting in the back of the class, he was playing again. On his
screen, tiny decks of cards flipped and twisted in cyberspace, and Melancon
placed bets with the click of his mouse. The profits just kept getting
bigger. $1,000. $2,000. $3,000. Dude, check this out, he told his buddy. As
class ended and the other students got up to leave, he checked his total one
more time. In the space of an hour, he'd won just about $4,000. Melancon
closed his laptop and walked out into the cold December air. What am I doing
in school? he wondered. Why don't I just do this all the time? Poker is red
hot on college campuses these days. A small number of students have made it
a full-time job, turning what is a game for most into a profession where
tens of thousands of dollars can come and go in a single night.
Today's college students are among the first to grow up with gambling so
accessible. Credit is easily available. Casinos, once relegated to Las Vegas
and Atlantic City, are now scattered across 37 states. Poker is a regular
feature on cable TV. Going to the casino has become a rite of passage for
students as they turn 18. Freshmen play poker in dorm rooms, fraternities
and bars host Texas Hold 'Em tournaments, and students hold sports betting
pools and use wireless Internet connections to play anytime, anywhere. "I
make a joke that ... the second-best gambling environment in America is the
college dorm," said Ken Winters, a professor at the University of Minnesota
who has studied youth addictions, including gambling. "You've got your
privacy, you've got your high-speed Internet, you have independence from a
parent, you probably now have some credit card money. ... It's like a little
mini casino right in your laptop. ... It's almost too easy."
College-age men, especially, have embraced the poker phenomenon.
Card-playing and Internet gambling have increased among college-age males
over the past five years, the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the
University of Pennsylvania found. About 16 percent of them played cards
weekly in 2006, up from nearly 13 percent in 2005, and nearly 6 percent of
them gambled online weekly, up from 2.3 percent in 2005. At Canterbury Card
Club in Shakopee, Minn., crowds are getting younger, said Kevin Gorg, media
relations manager. "Because of the popularity of poker on TV, it's become,
you know, kind of the cool, in-vogue thing to do."

On that cold December morning in 2005, Melancon, now 21, decided to quit
college. He and a group of friends have since bet their livelihood on cards.
They spend hours at card tables and computers, winning and losing thousands
of dollars at a time. They make fast money from less experienced players who
don't know what they're doing.

They don't want to do this forever, they say, but they're going to ride the
poker train as long as it keeps paying.

By 7:30 p.m. one October Thursday, Melancon's friend Mike Pickett had
already been playing cards for nearly seven hours.

He and more than 400 others had traded an autumn day for the green felt
tables and fluorescent lights of the poker room, hoping to win the $117,000
championship-event prize at the Fall Poker Classic at Canterbury Card Club.

Now, partway through the first day of the two-day tournament, the field was
down to 96 players. Pickett, now 22, was among the youngest. The oversized
hood of his sweatshirt shielded his baby face from his opponents' view.

Bryan Devonshire, another young professional gambler, had lost out early -
they call it "busting out" - and came back to watch Pickett and size up the
competition. "This is quite possibly the weakest field I've seen in a
tournament," he said with satisfaction.

Good players quickly earn reputations in the poker world, and Devonshire,
who stood off to the side spitting chew into an empty beer can, saw few of
them there. "There are one, two, three ... nine people left that can play,
and four of them are sitting right here," he said, pointing to Pickett's
table. "Ah, the nature of poker."

Pickett was on a roll. With each passing hour, he added to the towers of
chips piled up in front of him like tiny skyscrapers. Deal, bet, hope for
the best. Deal, bet, hope for the best. Hour after hour after hour. They
broke briefly for dinner and then got back at it.

In tournaments, chips can't be cashed in; the only money involved is the
entry fee and prize money. But the player with the chip lead has an
advantage at the tables, and some of Pickett's friends were watching his
stacks grow with a special interest. Five of them had formed a team and made
a $5,000 side bet with another team of five. If Pickett outlasted the
remaining player from the other team, he and his buddies would win the cash.

The night wore on. The pool of players continued to dwindle. Pickett
continued to win. Deal, bet, hope for the best.

By 11:30 p.m., some of the players were yawning, struggling to stay alert
after nearly 10 hours at the table.

Pickett, though, was in no mood to rest. Though his stacks of chips had
dwindled a bit during the last few hands, he was feeling like a winner.

"I'm feeling great," he said. "This table's a joke."

But with just over two dozen players left, the tournament organizer called
it a day. Playing would resume at 1 the next afternoon. The dealers started
collecting people's chips and sealing them in labeled bags.

Pickett lingered. "I wish we could keep playing," he said.

Some of his friends suggested they head to a bar. But as they passed a Three
Card Poker table on the way out, a few of them sat down. It was a game they
didn't normally play, but they tossed down some bills anyway.

Devonshire headed for the table, too. "I want in. I don't know how to play,
but I want in," he said.

He slapped down $5 and burst out with a giant, hearty giggle when he won
$150 on the first hand.

"All right! This game is awesome!" he yelled. "The odds of doing that were,
like, 470 to 1."

For this group of young gamblers, betting has become a natural part of life.

Devonshire's favorite bet last fall: whether more tire valve stems would be
pointing up or down when he parked a car. He once made a $1,000 bet with two
friends that none would wager more than $100 on side bets in any 24-hour
period - "a bet to prevent us from betting," he said.

The life of a professional poker player comes with freedom from schedules,
money to invest, travel, and extra cash for bars and restaurants. It's great
as long as the player is good enough to make money and the betting is kept
under control, Devonshire and the others say.

But it's also a tough life. There are grueling, all-night sessions staring
at a screen or sitting at a table, doing the mental math to assess risk in
each hand and trying to outlast opponents. There are giant swings in
fortune, from huge wins to demoralizing losses. And with poker available
around the clock, some feel they need to play around the clock. "I feel like
every time I'm not playing, I'm losing money," Pickett said.

The Minnesota group of friends - more than a dozen, most in their early
20s - is about evenly split between college graduates and college dropouts.
They help each other through the tough times. They exchange advice on
everything: how much money they should keep in their savings for the
downturns, how to play a particular hand, how to invest.

They make a good living, they say. Some drive luxury cars, have giant-screen
TVs and go on poker-playing trips to Las Vegas and the Bahamas. Some have
invested in real estate. One player, Mike Schneider, won $1 million at a
cruise ship poker tournament last spring.

The key is having the willpower to stop playing for a while when their luck
is down, they say. And when it starts feeling too solitary, they sometimes
get together with their laptops. They play individually, but they have the
camaraderie of the group.

They all say they plan to do something else eventually.

Stopping may come sooner rather than later, depending on the effects of a
2006 law designed to shut down online gambling in the United States.

Some veteran gamblers are wary about what a life built around poker might do
to the young guys long-term. "They end up being gamblers with no family, no
life, no nothing," said Dick Hoffman, who was also playing in the Canterbury
tournament. Hoffman has been gambling for 30 years, though not as a
profession. "Poker will be their life. Maybe that's OK, I don't know. But I
wonder."

Devonshire, 25, has already seen some effect.

He grew up in California and came to Minnesota to get married, but he says
late-night poker playing helped kill his marriage in less than a year. He
now lives just outside Las Vegas; a recent text message he sent at 7 p.m.
said, "Just woke up today :-)."

He went broke playing stakes that were too high for him, he said. He worked
his way back when a casino hired him to play poker to entice customers.

A former Christian youth minister, he struggles with how some in the church
might view what he does.

"I'm curious," Devonshire conceded to Hoffman, standing in the card club at
midnight on a Thursday. "In 20 years, what am I going to think about this
period of my life?"

On the second day of the tournament at Canterbury, Pickett continued to
expand his stacks of chips.

By early afternoon, his friends - some still a little bleary-eyed from a
late night - started trickling in to cheer him on.

"Let's go, Mickey!" yelled Andy Fox, a 29-year-old who rents a townhouse a
stone's throw from Canterbury and has been playing professionally for about
four years.

Ten minutes later, the pool of players was down to 10 and Pickett had won
another big hand.

"Way to go, bad boy!" Fox yelped.

With around $300,000 in chips, Pickett was the leader, and his friends were
confident he was on his way to winning the tournament. His towers of gray
and yellow chips loomed tall.

Then came a critical hand.

Checking the two pocket cards the dealer had tossed him, Pickett
nonchalantly flipped in four gray chips - $20,000 worth - for his opening
bet. One of his opponents tossed in a few more chips, re-raising to $70,000.
Pickett re-raised for everything his opponent had: more than $200,000 total.

The other guy didn't even blink.

The room went silent. Pickett's buddies craned their necks to watch.

The opponent flipped over his cards: a pair of kings.

Pickett flipped over his cards: a pair of aces.

"Thatta boy, Mikey P!" one of Pickett's friends yelled from the crowd.

"Yeah!" yelled another.

But Pickett hadn't won yet. His aces were hard to beat, but the deciding
factor would be the five community cards the dealer flipped over next:
Three. King. King. Seven. Jack.

It was the kings that did it; they gave Pickett's opponent four of a kind.

The crowd gasped. Pickett was beat.

In a single hand, his tournament hopes had come crashing down. In a matter
of seconds, he had gone from a likely winner to nearly finished, his stacks
of chips dwindling to a meager $62,000 worth. He'd need a lot more than that
to make a good run for the grand prize.

"That's brutal, man," another player at the table told him, shaking his head
as they got up for a break.

Pickett walked alone to the far corner of the room. His friends stood
helpless.

"He played it absolutely perfect and he got effed by the cards," Devonshire
muttered to the others. "God, that's so frustrating."

They stayed silent as Pickett came back. Another man wandered over, "You
need some Tums or something?"

When the game resumed, Pickett, devoid of the powerful chip lead, quickly
lost out. He finished ninth and won $7,799 - not bad for two days of work.
Days earlier, he won more than $17,000 in another tournament. Still, both
sums were paltry compared with the $117,000 grand prize and recognition he
was hoping for. It had been so close. But that's poker.

When Pickett busted out, it was only 3:30 p.m., too early to go to the bar,
they agreed. Instead they could lick their wounds at Fox's townhouse nearby.

Valets retrieved Pickett's black Mercedes. The license plates read "ANTE
UP."

They piled into the dimly lit townhouse and opened some beer. Nobody talked
about the tournament.