The table
was antique mahogany. The chips were casino-quality clay
in a gleaming, Bond-like steel carrying case. The game
was, of course, No Limit Texas HoldEm, except for the
players who had already lost their buy-in and joined the
poker and dice games in another room. Records of
earnings and losses for the 15 regulars and 7 occasional
players were kept on an Excel spreadsheet on one of the
organizers' computers.
After 11 p.m. or so, the winners pocketed their cash.
The players snacked on popcorn and whatever else they
could forage from the kitchen, argued amiably about who
was the biggest poker addict, and then ran into the
backyard, where the floodlights allowed for a
high-energy game of midnight football, the perfect way
for a group of ninth graders to end an evening out.
Do
you know where your high school kids are at night? If
the answer is yes, chances are it's because they're
poring over poker hands, practicing their dead man's
stares, and aping the big timers on ESPN sitting there
with dark glasses and million-dollar piles of chips at
the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Some
youngsters have always played poker for money. But,
thanks largely to the mania for televised poker, a night
out for adolescent boys (and it is virtually all boys)
in nearly any suburban town these days almost invariably
takes the form of a marathon game with stakes as low as
the $5 buy-in at this game or considerably higher at
some impromptu tournaments. The favored game is Texas
HoldEm, where each player is dealt two cards face down
and then plays a hand with four rounds of betting based
on those and five communal cards dealt open-faced.
Were
this "The Music Man," Robert Preston could easily
proclaim: "We've got trouble, right here in River City.
With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands
for Poker." But, as is often the case, when we look at
our kids, we see ourselves reflected back, so even those
inclined to wag fingers are mostly keeping it in check.
Certainly, most high school students don't see playing
poker for $5 or $10 a night as a huge moral issue.
"It's not much different than going to someone's house
and throwing around a football or baseball," said Ben
Wrobel, a junior at Mamaroneck High School, sitting with
two friends outside school on Thursday.
His
friend Andrew Klein makes money giving drum lessons. He
has won some money at poker, too, and he figures if he
loses $10 or $20 at the game - or occasionally a bit
more - it's his money. As for kids getting in too deep,
he hasn't heard about it, but, with the world weariness
of youth, he figures you can never tell.
"Nothing surprises me anymore," he said. "Bomb threats.
Middle school kids getting wasted at school dances. You
never know." (There was a notorious drinking incident at
a middle school dance last year.)
Pick
a town, any town, and you'll find kids more often than
not who know the difference between the flop (first
three communal cards in HoldEm), the turn (the fourth)
and the river (the fifth). The World Series of Poker,
which draws more than a million viewers per episode on
ESPN has made poker stars like Doyle Brunson and Chris
Moneymaker as familiar to adolescent boys as Kobe and
Shaq. (And if the pot bellies and sallow visages of the
supremely unglamorous poker elite aren't typical
celebrity profiles, their air of eccentric
inscrutability does have a certain middle school appeal
to it.)
The
Travel Channel's World Poker Tour and Bravo's Celebrity
Poker Showdown have also been enormous cable hits,
spawning other imitators.
At
East Hampton High on Long Island, the principal, Scott
Farina, said he hadn't heard about kids gambling on
poker. "It has never been brought to my attention," he
said. But of a handful of male students interviewed, all
said they played.
Kevin Gomez said he plays once a month or so, Robert
Dayton and Noah Kouffman said they usually play two or
three times a week, and James Westfall, a tall,
red-haired junior, said he liked to play in "block
periods" - he doesn't play for a few days and then plays
for several days, sometimes from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.
"Everyone has chips and decks," he said, adding that
most games are for modest pots, although he once won a
pot of $230. "I usually win, but when I lose I walk
away."
His
mother, Daryl Westfall, said she could tell there were
days he was happy because he had won, but poker was
mostly a mystery to her.
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