TEXAS HOLDEM ONLINE POKER

It’s poker night.

Fisher is in a South Berkeley home where a growing number of his friends and acquaintances convene every week to play Texas Holdem, a two-card poker game.

The 23-year-old Berkeley resident has been playing for six months, since he and his friends got excited about the newly reinvigorated card game.

Fueled by ESPN’s wildly popular World Series of Poker, the game is sweeping across the country’s campuses and has found a following among Berkeley students and other young players.

A $5 million win at the recent 2004 World Series of Poker pushed the series's national Nielsen rating—the standard rating system used by the television industry—up 42 percent, inspiring a whole new generation to play Texas Holdem and other poker variants.

While sometimes frowned upon, gambling is legal in California unless it involves a percentage game, where someone is making money above what is bet at the table, says Nelson Rose, a law professor at Whittier Law School.

Local card houses, online poker sites, professional players, poker paraphernalia vendors and problem gambling advocacy groups agree that the boon in televised poker has translated into a new interest in the game.

According to Gabriel Dominique of Games of Berkeley at 21251 Shattuck Ave., the store’s sales of poker chips and poker paraphernalia have jumped dramatically, accounting for more sales than the traditionally dominant adventure games. Some chip sets that students are buying cost as much as $220.

The trend has not just hit homes—local card houses have also seen a jump in players. Berkeley’s city regulations prohibit the formation of card clubs, but clubrooms near the city cater to the growing desire to play.

John Tibbetts, owner of the Oaks Card Club in Emeryville, one of the few clubs near Berkeley, says that in the last two or three years there has been a marked jump in the number of students at his club—which has translated into increased monthly revenues of 10 to 15 percent over the last year.

“I do see a lot of college-age people and a ton of Cal hats at the casino,” says James Hammer, a professional poker player at the San Pablo Casino and senior political science major at UC Berkeley.

But youthfulness, Hammer says, does not translate into poker savvy. Without practice and experience, many are finding the game much more complicated than it seems on television.

“I watch new players literally pour hundreds of dollars into games that they don’t have a chance to win,” he says. “A player can get lucky on a big night and that allure brings you back, but unless you really understand the odds and statistics, you are going to lose. I see a lot of people that think they are gonna win, it’s sort of sad.”

Because gambling is not the same as substance abuse, it can be harder to detect, and most college campuses are ill-equipped to deal with it, says Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

“Because it is a behavioral addiction people have a much harder time wrapping their heads around it,” he says.

Warning signs, he says, include heightened tolerances—translating into a need to bet more money to achieve the same excitement, a constant preoccupation with gambling that controls the players’ minds and a loss of control marked by not being able to set a betting limit, leading to major losses.

“I think about it right after I gamble, I think about what I should have done,” Fisher says. “You think about the big hands that you lose.”

Many of the players at Fisher’s group joined after being invited by friends.

At the long oval wooden table at Fisher’s Monday night game, the only talk was about going higher. Between the sounds of the players endlessly shuffling their stacks of chips, they discussed a 50-player tournament with a $25 buy-in, as opposed to the normal $10.

While the players contend that the game is more of a social event than a compulsion, the few words exchanged across the cards and chips were about the game itself, games gone by and games to come.

“Most fads do die, but poker has always been a uniquely American game, and it is hard to imagine its current popularity waning,” Whyte says.