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, mostly essentially splits his time between Princeton,
where he is a senior and a politics major, and Atlantic City, where he
plays high-stakes poker in his trademark black hooded sweatshirt and
dark aviator shades.
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 that says it is “licensed and regulated by the government of
Gibraltar.” 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.
“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. “Young people particularly are
drawn to it. There are superstars, then there`s advertising, plus the
Internet. So with all of those elements, put that into a bag and shake
it up and what you have is a remarkably dangerous situation.”
Last year, Elliott Dorsch, another Princeton senior, made $11,000 in
two hours playing online blackjack, only to lose most of it in 15
minutes, he said.
“I was playing very recklessly,” he said. “I was definitely very drunk.”
Vik Bellapravalu, a Princeton junior who plays poker with friends on
campus, said, “Whatever amount you can think of, it`s probably been
lost or won.”
Dramatic gains and losses have always been a part of gambling, but
access to poker games has never been as easy as the Internet makes it,
and undergraduates and students of youth gambling say that interest has
never been so high.
Members of both groups point to ESPN`s frequent broadcasts of the World
Series of Poker as a catalyst. The series has made heroes out of
everyman champions like Chris Moneymaker, who started playing poker
four years ago, and won the $2.5 million grand prize in the 2003 series
after entering for $40 through an online poker Web site.
Sandberg, from his narrow, attic-like room on the top floor of his
Princeton dormitory, can spend up to 10 hours a day playing the game he
loves most — Texas Hold`em, a popular version of poker that is simple
to learn but hard to master.
With his well-worn baseball cap and bristly, blond goatee, Sandberg
doesn`t look like a high roller, and his slapdash dorm room, bedecked
with poker posters, bears no marks of a conspicuous consumer.
Sitting on a folding chair in front of his laptop computer with a flat,
almost bored look on his face, he is a multitasker, playing three
online games at once, each for many hundreds of dollars, while
distractedly listening to classic rock and instant messaging his
friends. He speaks in poker parlance as if everyone understands it and
can innately calculate the odds of drawing pocket aces (two, face
down), while casually sizing up his online opponents and divining what
cards they may hold.
Thanks to a boom in tournaments and prize money, 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.”
Last summer, instead of getting a job, Sandberg set a goal of winning
$10,000 at PartyPoker, where he said he clicked and bluffed his way to
his goal by the time he returned to school in September.
“My parents said I should do something useful, and I made $10,000,” he said. “I thought that was pretty useful.”
His bank statement seems to support his claims of success, with a
six-figure balance, large withdrawals for what he says were casino
trips and even larger deposits from online winnings. His personal
account on PartyPoker.com echoes his bank statement, with matching
payments and deposits that are specifically for poker.
Sandberg credits his success to two simple principles: know the odds,
and don`t play more than you can lose. “It seems simple, but it`s one
of the biggest flaws of many poker players,” he said.
Ultimately, his goal is to enter the high-stakes poker tours and compete with his heroes.
“I want to get to the point where I`m the best in the world and play
against those guys on TV. I don`t want to tell stories about playing
with so-and-so once, I want to be doing it all the time,” he said.
Sandberg insists that he is not a compulsive gambler, and he does
exhibit a certain methodical, almost cautious approach to his gambling
in which he bets large amounts only when the odds are heavily in his
favor.
Some experts said they fear that college-age gamblers are swallowing
the hype of big-stakes poker without coming to grips with the dangers
of addiction.
“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. He called the gambling
opportunities “almost ubiquitous” for the college-age crowd. “The
administrations don`t do a good job of telling students how to get
help,” he said, “the same way they`re sending the “prevention and
responsibility` messages for alcohol, substance abuse and date rape.”
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.”
A free tournament organized by the group last year attracted twice as
many people as space would permit. This year`s tournament, however,
which offered $2,000 in donated prize money, was canceled by uneasy
administrators who had also canceled a fraternity-organized charity
poker tournament in November, raising a stir on campus.
Princeton, for its part, has no explicit rules about gambling on campus, and has not taken steps to address it.
“This is something we, the administration, need to sit down and decide
if there should be a uniform policy about it,” said Hilary Herbold, the
associate dean in charge of disciplinary action at the university. She
noted the formal policies devised in the wake of concerns about
file-sharing of copyrighted music in recent years.
Herbold said problem gamblers were currently being dealt with case by
case. The administration has broken up regular group games in
Princeton`s eating clubs.
“What we`re really primarily concerned about is the well-being of the
students,” she said. “Were I to discover that a student was gambling
online, I would probably tell them to stop and give them a warning.”
Whyte is concerned that college-age gamblers, often susceptible to
overwhelming stress and lacking a mature sense of money, are
particularly susceptible.
“They`re not going to lose their house if they don`t win,” he said.
“Mom and Dad can still bail them out. It`s just not as realistic a view
of money as adults, and it`s very hard to reach that age group. By the
time they`ve gotten to college, they`ve already started gambling.”
Sandberg said his parents are aware that he loves playing poker, but
don`t know that he spends almost every weekend in Atlantic City, nor
how much he has earned. His mother, he said, “thinks I just don`t tell
her about the times I lose.”
He added, “She thinks I`m up and down, but I really do win almost every time I go.”
Like video games and instant messaging, online poker has had its impact
on academics. Sandberg said that he failed a midterm exam this fall
because of his commitment to poker, and that he ranked in the bottom
fifth of his class academically.
But, he says, “I`m not too concerned with what my GPA is. You don`t
have to hand your resume to the casino when you walk in or anything.”
And even during final exams in January, Sandberg`s poker hours did not diminish.
“It`s tough to battle the mind-set of, “I`m going to graduate, and this
poker is pretty regular money,”‘ he said. “I don`t think I can make
$120,000 doing anything but poker. I was half-studying for my politics
exam today, but I got bored and started playing poker on my computer
instead.”
If the experts are correct, though, Sandberg might want to focus on that exam.
“Gambling is a game of chance,” said Whyte. “Some people can make a
living doing it, but even in the long run, most people regress to the
mean and wind up with zero or close to it.”
© The Day Publishing Co., 2005
