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Poker is major college craze
Published: 2005-03-01
 Poker is major college craze
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), March, 2005 by Jonathan Cheng New York Times News Service
PRINCETON, N.J. -- For Michael Sandberg, it started a few years ago with nickel-and-dime games among friends.
But last fall, he says, it became the source of a six-figure income and an alternative to law school.
Sandberg, 22, essentially splits his time between Princeton, where he is a senior and a politics major, and Atlantic City, where he plays high-stakes poker.
Since September, he says, he has won $120,000, including $30,000 in Atlantic City and $90,000 playing at PartyPoker.com, a popular online casino. Those claims are supported by his financial records.
Sandberg's is an extreme example of a gambling revolution on the nation's college campuses. Sandberg calls it an explosion, one spurred by televised poker championships and a proliferation of Web sites that offer online poker games.
Experts say the evidence of gambling's popularity on campus is hard to miss. In December, for example, a sorority at Columbia University conducted its first, 80-player, poker tournament with a $10 buy-in, a minimum amount required to play, while the University of North Carolina conducted its first tournament, a 175-player competition, in October. Both games filled up and had waiting lists. At the University of Pennsylvania, private games are advertised every night in a campus e-mail list.
Dan Kline, president of the poker society at the University of Pennsylvania, says that everyone is playing poker at his university.
"When we started this thing in 2002, about 10 people joined," Kline said. "Now when we have a tournament, we'll get 500 people responding in a half-hour to our e-mail." "It's the TV programs that are driving it," said Elizabeth George, chief executive of the North American Training Institute, a nonprofit organization in Duluth, Minn., that specializes in the problems of pathological and underage gambling.
"With gambling on TV, there's been lots of glamorization, but not much responsibility," said Keith S. Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. Sandberg, from his narrow, attic-like room on the top floor of his Princeton dormitory, can spend up to 10 hours a day playing.
Poker has become a career option for Sandberg, he says. Though he is graduating in May, he has not applied to graduate school or for any jobs.
"I'm playing this game, treating it like a job," he said. He predicts that he could make up to half a million dollars a year, just playing on his computer every day. "Even with the bad runs," he said, "I haven't had a losing month or even too long of a losing session. I think I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'm only going to get better at cards."
Copyright C 2005 Deseret News Publishing Co.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
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ONE OF the most common observations about online poker games is the high frequency of "bad beats" - strong starting cards that end up losing to weak hands
Published: 2005-03-01
 POKER
Independent, The (London), March, 2005 by Nic Szeremeta
ONE OF the most common observations about online poker games is the high frequency of "bad beats" - strong starting cards that end up losing to weak hands.
For example, a player in a limit hold'em game raises or re- raises with a pair of pocket kings, hits a flop of K2-Q#-9#, but ends up being beaten by a J#-3! in an opponent's hand when a 104 appears on the last card.
This type of outdraw is a common occurrence in the virtual card rooms. It is particularly frequent at the lower limits, but it also crops up in games at the $15-$30 level.
It may seem to be madness for a player to remain in a pot in which only four cards - in the above case, any of the four tens - can improve his hand. But, in fact, it may be the actions of the re- raiser that lead to his own downfall in a pot of this type.
The key factor is control of the pot size. There are two principles involved here. One is that if a player has been coerced into putting several bets into a pot, he is much more likely to put in some more. The other is that, if by raising and re-raising a monster pot has been developed, it may well be mathematically correct for an underdog in the hand to call to hit a long shot.
In some wild online games, a raise and a re-raise is not a prompt for the others in the field to pass but a trigger for them to get involved in search of a lucky flop. And once they are in, they are in.
The proud holder of, say, pocket aces re-raises pre-flop to $30 in a $10-$20 game and gets five callers. There will be $180 dollars in the pot before the flop is dealt. And when it is, the initial bet is only $10. Having invested $30 already, the participants will be more than willing to put in another $10 in the hope of getting lucky for a return of more than 18 to one.
Individually, the five optimists have only a small chance of overturning the aces, but collectively their chances improve considerably. With one card to come and a gutshot straight draw (four cards), the odds against hitting are just over 11 to 1 against.
If the pot exceeds $240 and the asking price is a bet of $20, the underdog actually has a positive expectation. Scary. In wild games of this nature, it is probably wiser to put the betting brakes on to keep the pots smaller.
Copyright 2005 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
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