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.
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.
One October evening, 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 in Shakopee, Minn.
Now, partway through the first day of the two-day tournament, the field was down to 96 players. Pickett, 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.
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.
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