The Leader

 

Online gambling might become harder, not just for college students, but for everyone if a bill to ban credit card companies from paying offshore casinos passes in the U.S. Senate. The object of the bill is to reduce the online gambling problems and addictions.

 

Jake Gill, a freshman and linguistics and business major, said he used to play five to ten hours a week on pokerroom.com. The most he’s lost in one sitting is $800 and the most he’s won in one sitting is $3,000.

 

“That is hard to answer because it all depends on the limit that you’re playing at,” Gill said. He hasn’t played much since he turned 21 in June, but he used a company called Neteller to transfer money from his bank account to the online poker site.

 

Andrew Greenwood, a junior in the School or Architecture and Urban Planning, used his debit card to transfer money to a poker website. Greenwood said that of his friends who play poker, about four out of five them also play poker online.

 

“I tried it once, but lost what I put in pretty quickly and haven’t bothered to add more money to my account,” Greenwood said. “I prefer to lose the money to people I can see.”

 

Both Gill and Greenwood agree that online gambling is addictive and that college students can easily get addicted.

 

“College students have a lot of time on their hands,” Greenwood said. “The ones I know who spend the most time playing poker online are the ones whose parents pay for college and don’t do much homework.”

 

Psychotherapist Debra Wentz warns of the danger of an addiction to online gambling due to the fact that it is so accessible.

 

“It’s easy money. It’s not having to get a real job, you can do it from where you live,” Wentz said. “You can lose your house, lose your car, lose your family.”

 

When it comes to students, though, Wentz said it’s not a specific personality type that gets addicted, but that college students are very at risk.

 

“There is time on their hands and it’s kind of a cultish thing,” Wentz said. “You’ll see small pockets of students gambling.”

 

Gill knows firsthand about the way that poker sucks a person in.

 

“You completely lose track of time,” Gill said. “There’s no currency in front of you. There would be times where I would play all night because [I’m] doing good.”

 

Gill said that college students gambling is somewhat like a phase. The gambling problem might decrease once students get out of school and start working more he said.

 

“The easy access that the younger generation has to playing poker online does possibly bring out people with addictive behavior,” Gill said. “I do think that the younger you are, the more susceptible you might be to an addiction.”

 

Wentz believes that more needs to be done to help addictive behaviors, but that it involves addressing the individual, not society as a whole.

 

“People who typically involve themselves in compulsive gambling… they’re looking for distractions. Distractions from other things,” Wentz said. “That’s what addictive behavior is.”

 

Even though online gambling is addictive, the question remains as to whether or not it is an issue that needs to be regulated by the government.

 

“It seems like such a petty issue for our government to be worrying about,” Gill said. “In the end, it’s really not going to prevent people from playing poker. Most poker players are going to argue that this is a game of skill that involves money.”

 

Wentz does not think that the bill to ban online gambling will do anything to stop addictive gamblers. The problem with gambling does not have to do with having money available, it has to do with the eternal drive for behavior she said. Wentz said that we just need more treatment for people with addictive behaviors.

 

“Most people, if they have an addiction, know they have an addiction,” Gill said. “If they have a problem, they’re going to find a way around it.”