WASHINGTON — Eric Froehlich, the son of a chemical engineer, was smart enough to win admission to suburban Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and then the University of Virginia. And then he discovered online poker.
Long identified with saloons, cigars and Mississippi riverboats, poker in recent years has found an unlikely home: in dormitory rooms, on the computer screens of clever young men. Froehlich won a major World Series of Poker tournament in 2005 at 21, making him the youngest winner of a coveted poker “bracelet,” until he was eclipsed by three players who were younger still.
“Gamblers are no longer gangsters with guns,” said Justin Vingelis, 22, a poker player and recent college graduate. “They are nerds with calculators.” The campus culture largely embraces poker.
But the federal government has been less indulgent. In April, the Justice Department shut down three leading poker sites and charged their owners with bank fraud and money-laundering. In a civil lawsuit filed last month, federal prosecutors alleged the owners of one site, Full Tilt Poker, pocketed more than $300 million in player deposits.
Full Tilt insiders “lined their own pockets with funds picked from the pockets of their most loyal customers,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement.
Among the losers is Vingelis, who joined Full Tilt at 18, when he got his first debit card. He bet a dollar or two at a time and reckons he made about $2,000 playing poker on the site before it shut down.
“From my conversations with some friends, we are all resigned to the fact that our money is gone,” he said.
20-somethings’ game
Poker has become a game of the young. The past three winners of the annual World Series of Poker “Main Event,” poker’s top tournament, were 22, 21 and 23, all males.
A 2010 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found 16 percent of college-age males, 1.7 million young men, gambled on the Internet at least once a month, primarily by playing poker.
Poker sites cater to college students. One promises: “$30,000 guaranteed! You’ve been studying, this is the exam!” To those who study gambling as an addiction, this predilection for poker imperils thousands of college students. Students with gambling problems are more likely to run up credit card debt, take drugs, get bad grades and steal, studies have found.
Today’s inquisitive teens discover poker for the same reasons their parents played chess and pondered the Rubik’s Cube. Poker is a particularly cerebral form of gambling, one that rewards not luck but math and logic.
For Froehlich, poker was like a puzzle, one “that’s very much not solved and very much never will be solved.” Froehlich, now 27, started playing poker when he enrolled at the University of Virginia in 2002.
Poker wasn’t meant to be a career, but Froehlich didn’t much like school. When he took time off to care for his ailing mother, he started playing poker. By 22, Froehlich had won two major tournaments and a lot of money, and “it almost seemed selfish not to go the poker route.” He is now a successful professional, playing in live poker tournaments.
Froehlich and other young players trace the explosion of collegiate poker to the ascent of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant who won poker’s biggest tournament in 2003 after qualifying through an online poker site. Poker became a marquee event on ESPN, a network already popular with young men who could now tune in to watch other young men win stacks of money.
“You’re talking about a group of people who are very impulse-prone, who can make poor decisions,” said Stephen McDaniel, a gambling expert at U-Md.
“Gaming” phenomenon
The past decade has seen an evolution of gambling to “gaming,” a triumph of euphemism amid a wave of legislation to legalize and destigmatize wagering. Forty-eight states now permit citizens to gamble legally, according to Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling in Washington. Utah and Hawaii are the lone holdouts. Poker, in particular, has become viewed as a sort of athletic event, although the U.S. government still views online poker as a crime.
“There’s been a massive cultural shift toward acceptance and accessibility and availability of gambling in America,” Whyte said. “And that certainly filters down to the kids.”
In this climate, some gambling experts say, legalized online poker is inevitable. Supporters say legalization would cleanse an industry tarnished by scandal. Because online sites operate outside U.S. law, they are largely unregulated. Fewer students are playing poker online since the federal crackdown.
“Poker’s already risky,” said Matthew Baker, 22, a graduate student at Virginia Tech. “Now, whether you win or lose, you still might not get your money. And it’s really hard to say which site is going to be trustworthy.”
But Baker wouldn’t bet against the online poker industry. “I feel like somebody’s going to fill the void,” he said.
