Predictably, there is a growing sense of alarm over the growing number of youths playing online poker. In fact, for many students, like Brooklyn teenager Oscar Santana, online poker is becoming the new American pastime. Santana, an 11 th grader who lives with his parents and two siblings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, comes home from school everyday, completes his homework, and then powers up his computer to play online poker for the evening. Santana, who is a member of his high school’s champion chess team, isn’t worried that he will become addicted to gambling, though. He is certain he’s got everything under control. “I can tell myself to stop”, he said. “Since I have been playing, I haven’t lost. I really don’t worry about getting addicted. I just love playing.”

The fears about the potentially dangerous consequences of online poker and its popularity among youth are not unfounded. Co-director of a youth gambling research center at McGill University in Montreal, Rina Gupta, echoes these fears. “It’s definitely a potential for concern and problems down the line,” said Gupta. “We are getting a tremendous amount of requests from the states for prevention information. They call and say ‘I am a counselor in a school - there are a lot of kids playing poker. Help!’” The problem is rather recent, however, so there isn’t much information available to help. “This is a new phenomenon, there is no research out there yet on youth and online poker addiction,” said Gupta. “But what we do know is that poker, including online poker, has caught on like wildfire.”

It doesn’t appear that the problem is going to resolve itself either. A national study, published last month by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, found an 84 percent increase in weekly card playing by males between the ages of 14 – 22. The study covered the years 2003 to 2004. The same study also found that weekly card players had a greater likelihood of gambling over the Internet even if they were under the age of 18. Yet another study, conducted by the International Center for Youth Gambling at McGill, found that out of a sample 1,100 twelve to seventeen year olds, 42 percent played gambling online, but not for money, whereas almost six percent gambled with real money. The remaining number of children in the study said that they did not gamble.

“This generation is in love with poker and computers”, said Heiko Ganzer, a therapist who specializes in gambling addiction. “And parents and teachers generally don’t have a clue what’s going on.”