TEXAS HOLDEM ONLINE POKER

Can the Texas HoldEm craze deal kids a winning hand in life by improving math and social skills?

Like many things in life, it's a gamble.

Pick up a TV remote and it's tough to avoid clicking past at least one show on stations like ESPN, Spike TV, Bravo and the Travel Channel featuring pro players and celebrities playing poker.

Hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of college, high school and even middle school students have taken up Texas HoldEm.

Mike Grates, a 28-year-old professional poker player who lives in Richmond, says, "More kids are playing just because more kids are watching it."

The upside, says University of Mary Washington senior Brett Druger, an avid player, is that it's a cerebral, social exercise that's much healthier for kids than spending hours vegetating in front of a video game.

"There's a lot of skill involved," the 21-year-old says, both mathematical and interpersonal.

The downside, Druger acknowledges, is that some might find themselves on a slippery slope to a gambling addiction.

"Some people convince themselves they're good players," says Druger, UMW's student director of community outreach and resources. "And if you want to play bad enough, you can find a game every night of the week, on campus and off."

According to the Center for Addiction Studies at Harvard Medical School, from 9.9 percent to 14.2 percent of North American adolescents have a gambling problem and 4.4 percent to 7.4 percent are compulsive gamblers.

"Gambling is a game for many but becomes an addiction for some," says Robert R. Perkinson, an expert on teen addictive behavior at the Keystone Treatment Center in Canton, S.D. "Gambling is as addictive as cocaine to those who are genetically predisposed to addiction."

Perkinson, who takes a religious-based approach to fighting addiction, decried the idea that gambling can be a tool to produce positive results in children.

"Seventy years ago, it was considered to be immoral to gamble," he says. "Now we are considering using gambling as a way to teach our children math."

But Richard Ball, a pediatrician at Akron (Ohio) Children's Hospital who regularly deals with parental questions about kids and poker, says it can be a healthy and enriching social function if supervised.

While warning that parents should watch for signs of problems, Ball agrees with Druger that the game can help the mental development of children. If kids play, he says little or no money should be involved.

"A $5 limit is probably about right," Ball says.

More problematic than playing with friends are poker and Texas HoldEm Web sites that offer online games 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Matt Hoover, a 22-year-old senior at UMW and devoted Texas HoldEm player, says the "biggest influence" causing the trend to grow is television.

Hoover, a Lancaster, Pa., native, and Druger, who is from Medford, N.J., began playing for fun when they were 18-year-old UMW freshmen after reading about poker in Maxim magazine.

"Everybody started picking up on it about a year ago when it started being shown on TV a lot," Hoover says.

Brad Daugherty, a former World Series of Poker champion, has set up an online poker school to take advantage of the interest among young men and women. He says "it won't take them as long to learn to play as it took me."

Hoover started playing Texas HoldEm at UMW in 2004, then played online at home during the summer in Lancaster, Pa., "because I was bored."

Both Druger and Hoover say the intellectual challenge of poker--Texas HoldEm in particular--is the attraction.

"It's more than winning and losing money," Druger says. "It's the competitiveness that can go along with it--a competitive atmosphere where you have a certain degree of control."

Grates, the Richmond professional, says: "To be a good player, you've got to be smart."

In person, it's possible to read other players, but playing online requires mathematical aptitude, Grates says.

"Online, a lot of these guys are math geniuses," he says.

And parents need to be smart about kids' online gaming activity. "If kids have credit cards, parents need to keep an eye on their card activity," Druger says. "If kids have access to money in savings accounts, parents need to watch that, too."

He doesn't believe parents should be alarmed as long as kids are playing in games with very limited amounts of money involved.

But, Hoover says, there's no way for online gambling sites to know if a kid has a parent's Visa card.

"With online poker, especially if someone gets their hands on a credit card, if you lie about your age, they can't stop you," Hoover says.

Ron Burke, president of empirepoker.com, says there are nongambling, "fun" games set up on his site for underage players. Credit card requirements should keep most kids out of games with financial stakes.

Druger, who has spent summers as a camp counselor, says he saw middle school kids playing Texas HoldEm with each other at camp last summer.

Hoover restricts himself to playing with small amounts of money he's accumulated in previous games.

He limits himself to $20 buy-in games on the Internet.

A $20 buy-in tournament on the Web can include thousands of players and have prize money totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

The biggest sum Hoover has ever won on the Web is $200. He's never lost more than $20 at a time, he said, but consecutive days of losses can add up quickly even with that limit.

Druger says he knows people for whom the game could be a problem, but believes it can be a positive outlet.

"A lot of kids are not good at sports and they can be good at this," Druger says. "This is the kind of thing where, if you read enough and you try hard enough, you can be good. You can be very good."