National poker craze could create a generation of problem gamblers

National poker craze could create a generation of problem gamblers By Lynn Franey For Knight Ridder Newspapers Jack's never been to a Kansas City riverboat casino. He's only 15, after all, well shy of the legal Missouri gambling age of 21. But he sees plenty of the gambling life anyway, thanks to televised Las Vegas poker tournaments beamed right into his living room. The high school sophomore can admire his favorite professional poker players. Sit on the couch and ogle gigantic stacks of cash. And learn strategies for $5 poker throw-downs with his buddies. Many people, including Jack and his parents, see no harm in betting a few bucks with friends in the security of their home, no matter how young they are. It can be a brain-stimulating social event, one local therapist says. But experts caution that gambling's expansion - TV poker, casinos and lotteries, Internet casinos, horse and dog tracks, casino-style after-prom parties, publicized sports-betting lines - makes America's next generation more vulnerable to gambling problems. Between 4 percent and 6 percent of adolescents are problem gamblers, a rate about twice as high as that of adults, according to the most recent studies. An additional 8 percent to 10 percent are at risk of becoming problem gamblers. And those stats are a few years old, before poker captured such wide interest. Toy stores now sell Texas Hold'em sets. Experts worry the numbers will climb in coming years. The earlier someone starts gambling, the more likely he or she will become an adult problem gambler, research shows. Most adult problem gamblers began gambling around 10 or 11, said Jeff Derevensky, who leads the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems in Montreal, Quebec. "Gambling problems are a progressive disease ... Today's children are growing up in a society in which it is totally legal, in which you turn on the major networks, let alone the specialty networks, and you see poker tournaments with major stakes," he said. "... They are growing up in an environment much different than ever before, so we don't know what's going to happen." Teenagers, primarily boys, have long played poker and bet on football and pool games. One theory about youth gambling holds that all people take risks when they are children but stop when they mature. So the children will be all right. Psychologist Bruce Cappo says he doesn't see anything wrong with children, even as young as 12, betting on cards. "I'd much rather have them working out mathematical probabilities of poker hands than sitting playing a video game all day," Cappo said. If they're playing for small amounts, the winning moves back and forth among the players, and the children still get outside and engage in other activities, it's not harmful, said Cappo. His 19-year-old son is a college student who likes to play poker. "It would be the excess that would be a red flag for me," Cappo said. "There are things about cards that can be helpful. It can get their mind working and be a social event." Another theory about youth gambling has darker overtones. "The other theory says these kids who grow up now with these problems, they're only going to escalate because once they get more access (to gambling), what's going to happen?" Derevensky said. Some evidence is emerging that young people are beginning to make up an increasing share of problem gamblers. In New Jersey, people under age 21 made 6 percent of the calls last year to a gambling help line, up from 5 percent in 2003 and 2 percent the three previous years. The percentage of help-line callers saying they were students grew from less than 1 percent in 2000-2003 to 4 percent in 2004. Problem gambling is hurting some children's academic and financial futures: _Therapist Michael Hanson worked with a teenager who in the past two years has played so much poker that he buried himself in debt, flunked out of college and got kicked out of his house. _Jean Holthaus, a social worker, knows a young man who owed so much money from losing pool-hustling bets that he forged relatives' checks, dropped out of school and is in trouble with the law. _A sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis boasted last semester in the student newspaper's "featured poker player" of the week column that he often played poker online until 6 or 7 in the morning and slept until 4 p.m., missing classes and even a midterm exam. Counselors and others who work with young people are becoming aware of the potential for problems and beginning to take preventive measures. They're distributing educational videos to schools, holding conferences and using grants to study the issue. They're also advising parents to watch for warning signs of potential gambling problems. Betting more frequently and with larger amounts of money are important signals. But there are others, too: withdrawing from friends and family, losing interest in other activities, exhibiting signs of depression and performing poorly in school. These signs should prompt parents to get involved and seek a therapist's help, experts say. Children whose parents suffer from gambling or drug or alcohol addictions are particularly at risk. Many children who gamble now believe they can be big poker winners, said Ed Looney, a recovering compulsive gambler who leads the New Jersey Council on Compulsive Gambling. "But it's a lot of luck," he said. "You get the cards or you don't get the cards. Parents should be aware of this, and if the kids play, they shouldn't play for money. They should play for fun, or little chips that don't mean anything." Without money, "They're not getting into the gambling aspect and it becomes a different animal." When there's money on the table, he said, "Kids are not in it just to play and be social. They're there to beat the other guy and get all his money." Scott Kaufman-Ross, a Washington University sophomore from New Jersey, played poker a lot last year with his dorm mates. No-limit Texas Hold'em, the most popular game right now, appeals to young men like himself. "That's excitement," said Kaufman-Ross, 19. "It's also the game with the most bluffing ... There's a lot of machismo in it and who can outmuscle other people." He keeps his bets small, he said, but knows other students who play with hundreds of dollars every day, as well as playing online. He admits to putting off writing a paper for an hour or so when he's playing, but won't let gambling interfere with schoolwork beyond that. "When you have the computer on and you have a split screen with poker and your paper, there's too many venues there for trouble," Kaufman-Ross said. "A, you'll lose your money, and B, you're not doing your work." As soon as he turns 21, though, he said, he'll hit the poker rooms at St. Louis casinos. Luke Sigle began trying his luck in Kansas City's casino poker rooms three months after he turned 21. Now the 22-year-old from Manhattan, Kan., plays poker here about every other week, while playing online at least several hours a day about six days a week. He qualified for the most recent World Series of Poker by winning an online tournament. The Web site paid his $10,000 World Series qualifying fee, but he lost on the first day. He started playing poker about three years ago when he was a track athlete at a Kansas community college. Now he's a semester away from graduation at Oklahoma State University. This summer and last, he's played poker like a full-time job. He says he's made enough money to pay off his car and essentially earned the equivalent of four years' worth of college tuition. Early on a recent Thursday afternoon, Sigle sat in the poker room of a local casino with several dozen people, almost all men, about a quarter of them appearing to be under 30. The air filled with the click-clack of poker chips being shuffled and reshuffled, stacked and restacked, arranged and rearranged in the players' constantly moving hands. As he played at one slow table, Sigle's eyes wandered to giant TV screens showing timber sports competitions. He rolled $5 chips through his fingers. He was up about $200 but then moved to another table, where he rapidly lost it all. After two hours, he left, ending up $3 for the day. He says he keeps poker in perspective by doing things that don't involve cards, like golfing and going to the lake with friends. He plans to get a regular job after graduation, but worries it won't pay him what he's been making playing poker. But poker does affect his life. He just missed the wedding of his best friend from high school because he was in Vegas for the World Series. And he hasn't played nearly as much golf the past two years as he would have liked. He owes his life as a poker player to the time period he grew up in, he said. If he'd graduated from high school in the early 1990s, rather than the early part of this decade, there would have been no TV poker to get him hooked on trying to qualify for the World Series. There would have been no Internet casinos for playing whenever he felt like it. (Before hitting the local casino recently, Sigle had won several hundred dollars playing online.) And there would have been no casinos where his pastime could bloom into nearly a vocation. He's alarmed about younger children already knowing how to play. "It's better than them having a party and drinking when they're seventh-graders, but if they're paying $5 buy-ins, that would be a little concerning that kids that age would start gambling," Sigle said. Jack's mother, who asked that the family's name not be used, says she's glad she knows where her son is and what he's doing when he's playing poker with his friends. They're not playing with much money, said Jack's father, just using bits of their allowance or some of their lawn-mowing earnings. No one in the circle of friends is so good that he wins consistently. Jack started playing poker when he was in middle school. He says he plays because it's better than sitting there bored. He likes hanging out with friends, and no one ever loses too much money. He says he probably wouldn't bother playing if they didn't play for money, because then players don't take it seriously enough. By contrast, 18-year-old Steve Yanda said he and his friends are probably "addicted" to the game, but not to the betting. "Playing poker isn't a problem," said Yanda, who will attend Marquette University this fall. "Playing poker and betting a whole lot of money is a problem." He isn't playing much this summer: "I use it to relax and you don't need to relax during the summer. There's nothing (like school stress) to get away from." Based on the children Behman Zakeri meets, the poker craze is not a fad ready to fade. Zakeri, who just played in his third World Series of Poker, owns a collector's frequented by teens and preteens. They buy cards for other games like Yu-Gi-Oh but talk about how they love to get together for poker games, he said. "What scares me with a lot of these kids is they don't have money. They work at Price Chopper or Hy-Vee. They make $200 or $300 a paycheck," he said. "If they lose that playing cards, they lose their whole paycheck. They don't understand the seriousness. "Poker is the most brutal lifestyle sport that any one person can do as a living. Thank God I have a job." Unlike Sigle, Zakeri had to pony up the $10,000 World Series entry fee because he failed to qualify through satellite tournaments. He busted out of the tourney the first day. When asked whether poker has had negative effects on his relationships, he says flatly: "I don't want to talk about that. Yes, there are bad times. When I win a major tournament, I'll write my autobiography and tell everybody the reality of poker."