Hello All,
I just finished watching MY Padres win another game tonight, and was trying to figure out what to come and write about here tonight. I was surfing through some channels and hear this on the headline news channel:
Next on Headline News - "Texas Hold 'em is like the holy grail on campus now, everyone is playing it! But is this dangerous to our kids?" Stay tuned...
Naturally they had my attention at this point. I even stayed through the commercial to watch the story. Headline News earned their money on me this time.
The story of course was like many I have talked about here on this site over the last few months. About how this poker craze is just getting bigger every day. This was a 90 second TV story so there wasn't a lot of statistical substance. The researcher from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, an entity I have spoken about here in the past says that they are finding that 1 in 10 students in both high school and college are gambling at least once a week. The story didn't offer any further detail than that on the prevalence of those teenagers that will develop into a problem gambler, but just go back through my archives here and you can decide for yourself if the chances of problems developing are greater, the earlier the introduction to gambling.
It isn't as bad as drinking or drugs is it? Some parents in the story don't think so. Some poker blogs I have read lately are even trying to say the game is not gambling at all. They claim it is all skill and very little luck.
Parents are even allowing their teenage children to host poker parties on weekends. They feel "better" since they know where their kids are at night. I understand this. They do not feel that there is any real chance that playing poker will develop into a gambling problem. I DON'T understand that. I sure know many people in Gamblers Anonymous with me that talk of being addicted to the online poker sites.
As for the parties, I went to plenty of "supervised" parties in high school where the parents knew we were drinking. They used the same rationale, that is being used here for poker parties. They think it is better they are supervised, that at least they are not on the streets. But believe me the parents at the parties I went to didn't know half of what was really going on. My guess is these "5 or 10 dollar" poker games the parents think are being played are much more than that. Kids are just like all other people, the rush gets diminished over time unless the stakes increase. There IS a danger. Will every kid playing poker on the weekend turn into a compulsive gambler? Of course not. I never became an alcoholic, and I drink less now than ever but the possibility is there and parents just need to be made aware of the danger signs.
My point is that we just don't know enough yet about what the ramifications of the legalized gambling expansion, the poker craze, the removal of the stigma of gambling in society, and the introduction to gambling at younger and younger ages will be in the future. As with my personal story, it is an addiction of "not yets". I had no idea when I placed my first bet that someday I would cross into a horrible addiction. So it could be with society and gambling in general, we may not know what might happen until it already has. Remember, I am not anti-gambling. I just think we need to be aware of where this may take us, and react accordingly.
I don't post every article I come across in a day here on the blog, but I read one earlier about a small town in Iowa's reaction to a new casino recently approved. There were all the normal good and bad arguments over jobs and crime, traffic and quality of life. There was one line that struck me from a woman who was on the fence about whether it was good or bad that the casino was coming. Referring to the projected increase in problem gamblers the casino may bring she said "sure it is only 3%, but what if that 3% is part of your family?"
Good point.
Oh, and unless you have X-Ray vision and can read the cards in another players hand, poker IS gambling.
John
P.S. - Well, at least I had something to write about.
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