Thursday, February 01, 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.