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This Issue 02/26/2009

• Think Outside the Box
• Los Angeles, We Have a Problem
• La Primavera
• Ego of the Week: Mike Zorger
• Mob Rules

“Someone is losing the money: who is that?” asks Dan Romer, the research director of Adolescent Risk Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which studies trends like gambling among youths. He is concerned because ARCI has been closely monitoring youth gambling since the World Series of Poker 2003 aired on ESPN. This was a landmark year for two reasons: it was the first time ESPN covered the event with a “featured table” that allowed viewers to see each player’s hand and follow the strategy, and it was when Chris Moneymaker, an amateur and “everyday guy,” won the tournament and its $2.5 million prize.

Chris Moneymaker’s success is largely credited with the post-2003 Texas Hold’em boom, which College sophomore Tim Tuveson epitomizes. “I saw Chris Moneymaker play on TV and I said, ‘I’m gonna do that,’” says Tuveson, who is back at Penn after taking a year off to play poker online full-time.

While Romer acknowledges that poker is not gambling the way slots is, the rise in youth gambling, particularly online, over the last decade has created potential for a lifelong habit. The latest Annenberg Survey of Youth shows that sports betting is growing, which raises the concern that one type of gambling leads to another.

Ben DiCicco-Bloom, a third-year sociology graduate student who studies poker and gambling among high school students, says that online gambling of any sort is dangerous because money is decontextualized. Live poker uses chips to create the illusion that no real money is at stake, which online poker only intensifies because nothing physically passes through the player’s fingers, DiCicco-Bloom says.

Jim Pappas, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania, said that although he could not offer exact numbers, many of the 1,200 calls received each month by the organization's 1-800-GAMBLER hotline are “regarding adolescents and internet gambling or Texas Hold ‘em via the Internet.” He too mentions that he has seen a spike in youth gambling since the media increased coverage of Texas Hold ‘em.

Nevertheless, Romer notes that since the 2006 passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act the youth survey has exhibited a drop in online gambling: in 2006, 4.1 percent of those interviewed reported gambling online at least once a month compared to 1.9 percent in 2008. The survey projects that “more than 300,000 youth in the study age range (14 to 22) gamble for money at least once a week on the Internet.”

As Romer and DiCicco-Bloom explain, UIGEA prohibits American financial institutions from transferring money to Internet gambling sites aside from fantasy sports, horse betting and lottery sites. Players who wish to bypass the law must use third-party venders for money transferring, an obstacle that is prohibitive for many.

Such legislation makes the future of online poker uncertain. Tuveson cites the “instability” of the field as the basis for his decision to return to Penn and finish his degree. Similarly, Steve Jacobs has traded playing poker full-time for Fordham Business School because “the legal landscape is getting trickier and trickier” and he wants a backup plan. Even so, he admits, “As long as there is good money to be made, I will keep playing.”

Yet a recent court case regarding live poker offers some hope for the future of the game: this past January, Judge Thomas James Jr. ruled that poker was not “unlawful gambling” under Pennsylvania Crimes Code because it “is a game where skill predominates over chance.”