According to the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling recent report says Florida college kids are twice as likely as the general population to be compulsive gamblers, and the biggest problem is young men playing poker online. It doesn’t help that they’re seeing televised poker tournaments starring phenoms barely old enough to drink.
It all starts as a fun college room game with a few wins and then some free poker websites on the computer and then it turns into a high stakes game with high debts that become a obsession that gets out of hand fast.
A whole new generation of kids thinks that what they want to do when they finish school is be a professional poker player,” said Dr. Jeffrey L. Derevensky of McGill University, who analyzed data gathered from seven Florida colleges and universities.
In this summer’s World Series of Poker, eight of the nine players who made the final table were 29 or younger. It’s also a man’s game: Only 3 percent of the 7,319 entrants were women.
What reels them in are the success stories, including that of Joe Cada, a 21-year-old college dropout who won the 2009 World Series of Poker.
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