Saturday, February 17, 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.
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. 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. 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.

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