TWO months ago in this space, we quoted a toy and game wholesaler who credited the sudden spate of televised poker with the equally sudden rush to buy poker sets – cards, chips and chip canisters. The salesman added that the purchasing boon, according to retailers, is being driven by “kids, boys in their early teens.”
We sensed it then, we know it now. The nation’s gambling epidemic, tracking younger and younger, has been accelerated and exacerbated by televised poker, which now appears on six U.S. networks at any time of any day.
Arnie Wexler, 36 years without a bet, is the former executive director of the NJ Council On Compulsive Gambling and has long been the media’s trusted go-to-guy on issues of problem gambling. He currently heads Wexler Associates, dedicated to the treatment and prevention of compulsive gambling.
“Until the last two years,” Wexler told us last week, “young gamblers – teens -followed a pretty standard pattern. Sports gambling came first, then all the other forms. All of a sudden, here comes poker. We now hear horror stories every day about kids deep into poker. Two years ago, we didn’t hear the word poker, at least not from kids or their parents.”
In my neighborhood, there’s now a money-in poker game, among boys, 15-16, every evening. Last summer they all played ball in the evening. Now, instead, they all play poker.
Wexler sent a copy of an e-mail from a parent whose 13-year-old is at sleep-away camp. Poker, it reads, is suddenly the preferred down-time, daily activity among boy campers, 12-16. The parent added that theft – to wash gambling debts and/or to continue to play poker – is commonplace.
A friend’s son told us that this past spring he could find a poker game among students at virtually any hour of every day on or close to his upstate New York college campus. He’ll be a senior. How many poker games did he run into his freshman and sophomore years (before ESPN, ESPN2, Bravo, The Travel Channel, Fox Sports Net and Comcast Sports Net began to flood TV and the senses with poker)?
“I don’t remember any,” he said.
Any fad-to-habit form of gambling that overtakes the young is tougher to fix than when it afflicts adults. At a time when socialization skills are supposed to be developed, they become choked and sense-deprived.
Dating is lost to gambling. Formal education is sacrificed. Personal hygiene, nutrition and sleeping suffer. Good friends become mortal enemies. Honest kids become liars, cheats, crooks. Typically, twin or multiple addictions (drugs, obesity, alcohol) arise. Desperation and depression is a commonly dealt pair.
Teen-to-young adult years lost to gambling, are difficult to retrieve. Young problem gamblers have the most difficult time righting their ships because they never sailed in the first place.
And young, vulnerable gamblers have never been confronted by more trigger mechanisms as gambling has been blessed by government, commerce and media as a legitimate, respectable and even glamorous form of both entertainment and enterprise.
Poker rooms within casinos have been expanded but still aren’t big enough to meet demand. Florida’s racetracks have added poker rooms and there’s a move afoot to increase the stakes, thus increase the state’s take. Buy-in poker games are all over the Internet. ESPN last week announced that ratings for its World Series of Poker series are way up.
“I spoke with a woman just the other day, who said her 16-year-old is playing real-stakes poker several times per week,” said Wexler (1-888-LAST BET). “She actually seemed relieved. She said, ‘At least he’s not on drugs.’