It's always poker night on campus

Monday, December 26th, 2005

By Wendy Koch
USA TODAY

Every Sunday at 6 p.m., coast to coast, more than a thousand college students go online to compete for scholarship money in the qualifying rounds of a national poker tournament.

Others play the hot poker game Texas Hold'em in all-night tournaments, at campus fundraisers, in dorm rooms with friends, or increasingly, on the Internet.

Poker, once a pastime for cowboys in Wild West saloons but now a cash cow for cable TV, is at the forefront of a gambling craze that has swept colleges nationwide.

"The popularity of poker is absolutely phenomenal," says Elizabeth George, chief executive of the North American Training Institute, which specializes in dealing with problems of youth gambling. "It is head and shoulders over other types of college gambling."

"The word, conservatively, is 'epidemic,' " says Edward Looney, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey. He attributes poker's surge to its glamorization on TV shows such as Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown and to the accessibility of the Internet and credit cards.

Half of college men say they have gambled on cards at least once a month this year, up from 45% in 2004, according to a study released in September by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. About 15% of them played at least once a week in 2005, up from 2% in 2002. Only 1.6% of college women said they played weekly this year.

Card players are more likely than other gamblers to go online, the report says. It cites a fivefold increase in weekly Internet betting since 2002.

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