by Jay Busbee

Now add poker into the mix… and just try to tell us there’s one of you out there who wouldn’t go back to college in a heartbeat.

Poker might just be the perfect college game, combining classic campus elements like partying, camaraderie, competition, and a little lowlevel deception. And college students, with acres of free time and scads of willing opponents, are flocking to the game by the thousands.

Many students are having astounding success — Jeff Madsen, for instance, won two WSOP bracelets last summer while still a student at UC Irvine — but many more are becoming well-educated chum for more experienced online players, and are finding themselves deep in debt long before graduation. These marks generate horror stories that dwarf their actual numbers, like the oft-quoted anecdote about the class president at
Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who robbed a bank in 2004 to pay off a $5,000 poker debt.

A 2005 study of campus gambling by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in Philadelphia reported that, of the 17 million college students in the United States in 2004, 1.6 million gambled on the internet. Congress’s crackdowns on online gambling last fall mean that figure may not have increased significantly, but the campus nonetheless remains one of the hottest recruiting grounds for new poker talent.

So is poker on campus a looming crisis along the lines of underage drinking or illegal music downloading, or is it a mostly harmless pursuit along the lines of football games and small-hours philosophical debate? Chances are, where you stand on the issue depends on the size of your chip stack — and whether you’ve got a chemistry exam tomorrow morning.

What’s beyond debate is that both live and online poker are flourishing on college campuses. Dorm-room poker doesn’t overly concern campus administrators; while the games can technically be illegal, the stakes are generally very small. Although a fish can find himself eating Ramen noodles for a month, his poor play generally won’t cost him his tuition. It’s the rare dorm-room game that accepts credit cards for payment.

Online poker, on the other hand, is a much more serious concern, particularly when combined with the credit card offers that stuff every college student’s mailbox. If college students are smart enough to work their way through differential calculus or a Shakespeare sonnet, they can figure out a way to get money into an offshore poker site. And from there, it’s not a huge leap to imagine that they can get themselves into worlds of debt.

“College students often have a mindset that ‘It won’t happen to me, I won’t take it to that [problem] level,’ not just with poker, but with everything,” says Tom Szigethy, Director of Alcohol and Other Drug Education Services at the University of Connecticut, who notes that his university faces the dual issue of both online poker and easily-accessible brick-and-mortar casinos. “It doesn’t affect them until they’ve seen a student who’s blown his tuition money on gambling.”

On the other hand, poker proponents counter that such slides are possible with any of the temptations that await students in college — alcohol, drugs, crappy diets, heartbreak — and that part of being a college student is learning how to prioritize the necessities and keep such temptations in
check.

“Gambling problems are difficult to identify because they’re so easily hidden until there’s a real problem,” Szigethy agrees. “The issue we run into at the college level is, how much do we make decisions for the students, and how much do they need to be educated to make safe decisions for themselves?”

Certainly, the students who know what they’re doing can profit hugely from poker. Consider Justin Rausch from Penn State, who entered a 2,000-player college student tournament sponsored by Absolute Poker, won his way to the six-man final table, and walked away with the second prize of a semester’s tuition. “I was pretty surprised,” he says, noting that even now he only has time to play once or twice a week. “But I got some breaks, and got flown to New York for the final table. It worked out okay, I guess.”

One key question in the college poker explosion is whether online poker is headed for a Napster-style campus crackdown, with colleges restricting access to poker sites. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could; campuses sensitive to criticism from the media (and from tuition-paying parents) are likely to take a hard look at whether they should deter students from the game. (College poker-playing students reading this article might strongly want to consider taking the offensive and creating or joining oncampus poker clubs, many of which promote responsible gaming.)

“It’s similar to alcohol; society’s view on it is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Szigethy says. “Throughout society we see how much the state makes off gambling and the lottery; we see football and basketball pools that aren’t portrayed as a bad thing. It’s seen as a game, and you don’t see the other side of it until you’re entrenched in it.”

“You have to know your limits, know how much you’re willing to lose,” Rausch agrees. “If you can walk away when you hit that, you can balance poker and college just fine.”

Campus officials and poker vets alike agree that the allure of poker is its chief danger; naïve students who see kids their own age raking in five and six figures on television assume that they can jump right onto that career path. “When you’re in college, nobody really likes to work and go to class,” says pro David Williams, who notched second-place finishes in both the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event and the 2004 World Poker Tour championship at the Borgata while still a student at Southern Methodist University. “So they’ll see [poker] on TV and say, ‘Screw this. I don’t need to be a college student. I can play poker!’”

Williams followed in the footsteps of football and basketball athletes and turned pro before he finished college. To him, it wasn’t a rash decision, but the product of long-term career training: “I’d been playing since 1997, grinding it out in small games,” Williams recalls. “I went to college during the day, did my homework in the afternoon, then went out at night to get the couple hundred or so I needed to live on.”

For Williams, the key was keeping poker and studies separate. “I kept my poker away from college and played in bigger, private, underground games around town,” Williams says. “There were lots of small games around, $100 buy-ins and things like that, but I was already playing at larger stakes than guys around me ever thought about.”

Williams recalls playing in one tournament just before his big World Series win, a charity fundraiser at a fraternity. “A lot of guys showed up, and most of them were not very good,” he says. But he didn’t smoke them like a man among boys — “It was a goofy tournament, self-dealt, a thousand in chips and 100/200 in blinds,” he laughs. “I made it a couple rounds and busted out. But it was for charity and all in fun.”

Plenty of would-be Jeff Madsens and David Williamses think they’ve got the chops to take a crack at the pro game. But Williams notes that the smartest players realize that they’re learning valuable skills even when they’re not at the table. “I get this all the time — ‘I want to drop out of college and be a poker pro,’” he says. “It doesn’t work like that; it’s a gradual thing. The main reason people go to college is to learn responsibility. You have to answer to teachers, you have to meet deadlines. Once you master that, you’re ready for the poker lifestyle. But it takes a while to get that mastered.” And unlike football or basketball, there’s no need to rush it; your poker skills won’t measurably decline as you advance into your thirties.

Williams cautions would-be early exiters from school to use a little sense. “I didn’t quit college until after the World Series, after I’d secured my long-term future and gotten a long-term sponsorship with Bodog. I didn’t have to worry about ups and downs, worry that something would go bad and then I’d be out of college. My advice is to stick with school and make your money while you’re in school. Eventually, if you make enough money and you figure it’s more profitable to leave, then you give it a shot. But that way you’re always covered.”

Best-case scenario, then, is that budding pros leave college with the triple threat of a degree, a bankroll, and well-honed skills. And in the “worst” case, they’ll graduate from college, get a job, become a respectable member of society… and clean house every weekend in their local neighborhood poker game.