“Online Poker has targeted Youth - dire consequences are Predicted”

An increasing feeling of worry concerning the expanding number of young people participating in online poker is as forecasted being felt. For Oscar Santana, a Brooklyn student, and actually for numerous other students, online poker is evolving into the latest hobby in the United States. After returning from school each day and finishing his homework, the eleventh grader, Santana, who lives with his mother and father and two siblings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, turns on the computer and spends the evening playing online poker. He is not concerned about gambling addiction and Santana also plays chess in his high school’s champion chess team. According to Santana, he is always capable of telling himself to stop playing as he feels sure he’s absolutely on top of it. He says that he’s never lost from the time he started playing, and he’s not in the least concerned that he could be hooked. It’s simply the love of the game.

The jeopardy facing young people as a result of playing the popular online poker and the anxiety regarding the serious results are well established. These uncertainties are reiterated by Rina Gupta, at McGill University in Monreal, who is co-director of a research center for youth gambling. Gupta further added that it’s most certainly a complete source for worry and problems. Information on how to prevent this situation is in huge demand by the states. According to Gupta, who serves as a school counselor, there are cries for help as so many students are playing poker. There is not a great deal of relevant assistance information about due to the fact that the phenomenon is still quite new. Gupta remarks that there is no research on the addiction caused by online poke and on young people as this is a recent issue. However, it’s a fact that this problem of online poker is spreading like mushrooms sprouting after the rain.

The problem, so it seems, is not going to be resolved too. Last month, the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania published a national research, showing that males aged between fourteen and twenty two represent an eighty four rise in card playing each week. The years 2003 to 2004 were explored in this research. If under the age of eighteen, weekly card players were found by the research, to have a greater chance of going on to gamble online. The International Center for Youth Gambling at McGill carried out another research, and discovered that forty two percent of a sample of one thousand one hundred youth aged twelve to seventeen, were gambling on the Internet, however, they were gambling for money, while for actual money close to six percent were gambling. The rest of the youth did not gamble according to the research.

According the therapist Heiko Ganzer, who is a specialist in the addiction of gambling, the current generation adores computers and poker. And as for the teachers and parents, in general they don’t appear to have any idea about what’s happening.