Parents For Poker

By Nathan Thornburgh / Torrance

It's late afternoon in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, and Renee Tanaka isn't worried about where her teenage son Ryan or his friends are. They're in the backyard, safely gambling the day away.

At a table under the gazebo, Ryan, 16, and his friends are playing poker for money, a pastime that many would consider at least inappropriate for kids and that is outright illegal in some states. It doesn't matter that the teenagers are playing a $5 buy-in poker game so excruciatingly slow that it would take a fortnight to run through Ryan's allowance. Gambling is gambling, and with today's endless hand wringing about kids and distractions, it is a scourge, a gateway to a lifetime of misbehavior and penury.

For everyone, that is, except kids and their parents. In fact, as high schools settle into the routine of a new school year, poker is resuming its place as one of the most popular and socially accepted activities in teenagers' lives. Cable TV draws young viewers for popular celebrity-poker shows and big-ticket poker tournaments (more than a million people tuned in for each ESPN telecast of the 2006 World Series of Poker). Schools throughout the country offer casino nights, using play money or raffles, as a way to keep kids from going to unsupervised parties, with their attendant risks of alcohol and drunk driving. And almost everywhere, parents gladly throw poker games for their teenage children, particularly the boys.

Why the parental aiding and abetting? It's not just that poker in the home keeps kids off the unpredictable streets. Many parents are saying that their kids get real-life lessons from playing poker with one another. Keeping track of the odds and the cards can help sharpen math skills without the kids even knowing it. And perhaps more important for teenage boys, who studies show lag in the development of their emotional intelligence, poker provides personal interaction. The game's central task--reading faces and psyching out opponents--can boost their EQ in ways that many other typical teenage activities do not. "As long as the money doesn't get out of hand, I think it's positive," says Renee. "They're building friendships. And I think it's teaching them some skills too."

Many experts agree with her. In their classic 1944 book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern built a mathematical model of economic and social organization--creating the foundations of modern game theory--by studying strategy games like poker. Poker is like life, the argument goes, a battlefield where the players constantly try to assess risks and guess one another's next moves. More recently, Anthony Cabot, a leading gaming-law attorney who represents online and casino operators, co-authored a paper for the Thomas M. Cooley Law Review linking poker to other games in history, like jousting, that have motivated young men to increase their combat skills. He wrote that even Islam, which prohibits gambling, has made exceptions for betting on horse races as a way to spur, as it were, youths to become better horsemen and warriors. Some educators leverage the game's current popularity to sneak in their lessons. Emory University math professor Ronald Gould, for example, teaches his freshmen students basic concepts of probability using five-card stud, or for more challenging computations, a seven-card game like Texas Hold 'Em.

Not surprisingly, the concept that poker might actually help kids has its naysayers. The main topic of discussion at the National Council of Problem Gambling's annual convention in St. Paul, Minn., this past June was the rising threat of kids and gambling. In his keynote speech, Jeffrey Derevensky, co-director of the McGill University Youth Gambling Research Clinic, called out government and private industry for the unprecedented marketing of gambling to kids--from using cartoon characters on state lottery scratchers to mainstream retailers' selling World Poker Tour chocolates. He cited a number of studies showing a link, although not necessarily a causal relationship, between teen gambling and higher rates of drinking, drugs and suicide. He estimated that there are 5 million youths in the U.S. and Canada who have some kind of gambling problem. Parents are a big part of that problem, he said. "Just as you wouldn't sit down and have a beer with your 10- or 11-year-old child, you shouldn't gamble with them, either."

Derevensky concedes that the research on adolescent and teen problem gamblers is still limited, largely because most serious addictions only begin to show once kids are living on their own or in college. The key to preventing problems, he says, is reaching kids early, not with a message of abstinence but of moderation and awareness of the risks. The challenge is to find effective ways of teaching those lessons. Last year, the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, located in the home state of casino-rich Atlantic City, developed what executive director Ed Looney says is the country's first responsible-gambling curriculum for grades K-12. The program emphasizes rational decision making and an awareness of the incredible odds against winning at casino games and the lottery. Counselors say the problem is that kids are inevitably exposed to gambling before they are developmentally prepared for it. "Younger children lack abstract thinking, so they believe that if they win, it's because they're special or because God loves them," says Brad Tucker, an addiction counselor in Peterborough, Ont.

That's why Looney wants to reach even the youngest kids with a message of moderation. "The program isn't there to say whether gambling is bad or good," he says. "We just want kids to learn how to make good choices." The curriculum remains voluntary for schools, however, and Looney admits that responsible-gambling programs like his often get squeezed out of the busy school year by higher priority subjects like sex education and drug prevention.

That leaves the job of teaching kids how to be smart about gambling to parents. "We know that poker comes along with a lot of bad habits, but so do a lot of other things," says Cindi Williams, whose son Jeff, 20, began playing poker in high school by holding regular games around the pool table in the family basement in Atlanta. Her strategy, she says, was to talk to Jeff about the risks and always make him play with his own money so that he stayed within a budget. Under those rules, she says, Jeff and his friends developed the ability to size up other people and deal with them diplomatically. "We need them to work out this Middle East thing!" she says with a laugh. "They're very good in understanding the other side of the situation."

Then, of course, there's the money. Like a growing number of poker-playing kids, Jeff got heavily involved in Internet gambling when he went to college. Online poker, with the potential to play many tables at once and the possibility of quickly losing your entire year's tuition in a torrent of bad-luck bits and bytes, can cut both ways. It provides the same emphasis on logic and calculation but lacks the social controls of face-to-face games with friends. It can swallow players up, as in the infamous case of the Lehigh University student who robbed a bank last December to pay off his online-gambling debts. More rarely, a kid can end up with a winning hand. Such was Jeff's case. He parlayed his basement game skills into a brief obsession with online poker, which culminated in his winning a $1.1 million poker tournament in Monte Carlo this March.

Back in Torrance, Ryan and his friends are finishing their game. They have read the instructional books, watched the pros on TV, and are surprisingly good players. At one point Ryan even thought he wanted to be a professional after he leaves high school. But there's no manic intensity to their game. Rather, the boys have a laidback camaraderie, cracking jokes about who's the best liar and paying as much attention to one another as they do to the cards. That camaraderie takes a break when the poker game does and the boys turn to playing video games. Renee made chili dogs for them to nosh on, but the food is all but ignored as the teens rush to the living room to feed what seems to be their true addiction: Guitar Hero on PlayStation 2 and Mario Superstar Baseball on Nintendo GameCube, which they simultaneously start up on two adjacent television sets. There's no more small talk, just grunted taunts and the occasional "Not now!" thrown at any adults who try to intrude. Small wonder that more parents are putting their money on poker.

Are your kids in danger of gambling too much? For a risk assessment, see time.com/gambling

With reporting by Anne Berryman / Atlanta