Students feverishly emptied the ATMs. It wasn’t a hold-up, but rather a hold’em: Texas Hold’em poker, that is. The gathering of freshmen played all night in Hill College House, continually dashing to the nearest cash machines for more betting power. As Rick Heaslip and Joe Smith* recall, it wasn’t morning that stopped the game — it was a lack of funds. But poker wasn't the one to blame; they had managed to bankrupt the ATMs before bankrupting themselves.
The knit cap pulled low on Heaslip's head and the un-tucked blue polo shirt and khakis sported by Smith are ordinary at best. Their basic stats are no different: Heaslip, 21, hails from Bucks County and graduated from Penn in December with a degree in English; Smith is also 21 and a senior in Wharton. That they’re about to go rock climbing together in Pottruck isn’t notable either. Ask about their post-graduation plans, however, and suddenly the two men leave normal behind. Heaslip is a professional poker player, and Smith intends to match his salary next year with his poker income by playing after work.
And the rock climbing? They believe a healthy body enhances their concentration on the game that they spend two to six hours a day playing online.
The duo describes that night in Hill during their freshman year with nostalgia that seems to stem not from the temporal distance but from the “old” way of playing poker it recalls. They’ve traded live, social games for PokerStars.com and FullTilt.com, treating poker with the sobriety usually reserved for AA meetings. They affirm that Penn has a close-knit poker community, but for them the game has become a job of sorts, and they have too much respect for poker and its players to ruin other students’ casual sessions with their own serious approach. But there is another reason for their switch that humility makes them reluctant to state: the size of their bankrolls puts them beyond the reach of most players on campus and playing online is far more lucrative.
Indeed, Heaslip claims approximately $7,000 as his biggest single-day win, a number all the more astounding given that minimum wage in Pennsylvania is $7.15. (Do the math: that’s a reward of over 979 hours of minimum wage work in a 24-hour period.) Smith’s largest single win is $3,000, since he mainly plays $100 buy-ins while Heaslip plays $200. But both live modestly, using their poker income for rent, tuition and food, though Heaslip admits that before he learned to save he “went through a phase where I went to like every Stephen Starr restaurant in the city.”
Their winnings also buy them tools that boost their playing ability. A peek into Heaslip’s off-campus apartment reveals one such purchase: a three-screen set-up connected to his computer that grants him ample desktop landscape for the 10 to 15 tables he plays at a time. And since a good player rakes in $10-20 per hour at a single $200 buy-in table, playing 15 tables at once can yield $300 per hour, says Heaslip. Nevertheless, he clarifies, “That’s not guaranteed… There’s a lot of variance in the short-term.”
What’s more impressive than those numbers is that their bankrolls are built from almost nothing. “I deposited like $25 and played $3 tournaments of these single table ones and then kept moving up stakes. Later I moved over to cash games,” explains Smith. Heaslip learned to play in high school but echoes a similar trajectory. “As far as online money goes, I started off with $20, and now I have lots… And I’ve never lost all my money, ever, in years of playing.” He also notes that aside from his initial investment, “I never, never, never take money from outside of poker and throw it inside.”
This self-imposed rule reflects their highly rational approach to the game. While the current economic climate weakens the comparison, Heaslip and Smith draw parallels between poker and trading. “It’s all about money management. If you manage your bankroll well, and you never risk a lot of it at once, then it’s very, very hard to actually lose all your money,” Heaslip explains. They insist that it’s money management, not pure skill, that trumps in the long-term.
The Wall Street analogy proves integral to how they conceptualize the distinction between poker and gambling — a word the two men never utter when discussing the game. “Anyone can bet on the stock market and treat it like gambling; or, if you know what you’re doing, it can be… not gambling at all,” Heaslip says. This element of strategy is what differentiates poker from casino games governed solely by luck, like craps or roulette. Luck may dominate in the short-term, Smith adds, but “if you push that probability over and over and over again, that’s the element of skill.”
*name has been changed
Around 4 p.m. on Friday, February 13, over a dozen Penn and Princeton students face off in the Golkin Room on the second floor of Houston Hall. They are dispersed among five tables placed in a row. The green felt draped over the tables pays homage to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but without electronic jangles blasting from slot machines, the room has a silence unknown to those gaming hubs. Some of the competing players chat, but most remain mute, barely raising their heads high enough to look their opponent in the face. They play with chips, but it is pride, not money, at stake.
This is the First Annual Intercollegiate Poker Invitational.
The Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society sponsors the tournament, and at odds are Penn and Princeton’s respective chapters of the society. The close-knit poker community Heaslip and Smith speak of has become more visible due to this club, known as Penn Poker, even though the group is only in its second year.
The club’s lightning rod effect within the poker community astounds even its founder and current president, Wharton junior Daniel Axelsen. For Penn Poker’s first meeting in fall 2007, he booked a 20-person Huntsman Hall room that overflowed, the enthusiasm surpassing the high attendance. “People were interested in meeting other people for cash games, playing tournaments without any cash, they were interested in strategy sessions — not only attending sessions and learning about strategy but actually giving them as well," said Axelsen. “I was really stunned at the type of passion there was.”
The spectrum of programs that attendees desired reflects the myriad ways poker manifests itself on campus. Beyond the Ricks and Joes — who were both at the Invitational — are students like Chrissy Lundquist, a College junior and the executive vice president of Penn Poker. She generally plays twice a week, prefers casual games among friends and does not play poker online. Though what she considers a big win — $50 — seems small change to many Penn Poker members, Lundquist and Axelsen both attest that the club offers a welcoming environment to players of all levels. “People understand. They got started at some point, too. They were losing money at some point. It’s an educational process,” explains Axelsen.
In addition, Lundquist notes that women should not be intimidated from playing or learning to play. She admits that “it’s definitely a boys club” but insists that this can be made an advantage: men lose by underestimating female opponents.
Uniquely, Penn women have a model of sorts in the poker world: Annie Duke, one of the most successful female poker players, was a graduate student at Penn in the early '90s before she made it big in Vegas. Penn also has claims to poker stars like Roy Winston and Arthur Sklansky, W’70, who wrote the seminal Theory of Poker in 1987. And Joseph Udine, C’06, and Steve Jacobs, C’05, stand out among recent alumni who are succeeding in the poker scene. Awareness of this poker legacy enhances the playing experience at Penn, says Axelsen.
But Penn Poker’s main focus remains the strategy, the intricate subtleties, of the game. And this is not without its own strategic purpose. “We’re hoping that Penn Poker’s existence will help prevent an unhealthy habit … of gambling,” explains Lundquist. “If you’re playing it and you’re paying attention to the more intellectual component and the strategy behind it, then you’re going into it with a completely different perspective than … [playing] because you need to make money.“
“Someone is losing the money: who is that?” asks Dan Romer, the research director of Adolescent Risk Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which studies trends like gambling among youths. He is concerned because ARCI has been closely monitoring youth gambling since the World Series of Poker 2003 aired on ESPN. This was a landmark year for two reasons: it was the first time ESPN covered the event with a “featured table” that allowed viewers to see each player’s hand and follow the strategy, and it was when Chris Moneymaker, an amateur and “everyday guy,” won the tournament and its $2.5 million prize.
Chris Moneymaker’s success is largely credited with the post-2003 Texas Hold’em boom, which College sophomore Tim Tuveson epitomizes. “I saw Chris Moneymaker play on TV and I said, ‘I’m gonna do that,’” says Tuveson, who is back at Penn after taking a year off to play poker online full-time.
While Romer acknowledges that poker is not gambling the way slots is, the rise in youth gambling, particularly online, over the last decade has created potential for a lifelong habit. The latest Annenberg Survey of Youth shows that sports betting is growing, which raises the concern that one type of gambling leads to another.
Ben DiCicco-Bloom, a third-year sociology graduate student who studies poker and gambling among high school students, says that online gambling of any sort is dangerous because money is decontextualized. Live poker uses chips to create the illusion that no real money is at stake, which online poker only intensifies because nothing physically passes through the player’s fingers, DiCicco-Bloom says.
Jim Pappas, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania, said that although he could not offer exact numbers, many of the 1,200 calls received each month by the organization's 1-800-GAMBLER hotline are “regarding adolescents and internet gambling or Texas Hold ‘em via the Internet.” He too mentions that he has seen a spike in youth gambling since the media increased coverage of Texas Hold ‘em.
Nevertheless, Romer notes that since the 2006 passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act the youth survey has exhibited a drop in online gambling: in 2006, 4.1 percent of those interviewed reported gambling online at least once a month compared to 1.9 percent in 2008. The survey projects that “more than 300,000 youth in the study age range (14 to 22) gamble for money at least once a week on the Internet.”
As Romer and DiCicco-Bloom explain, UIGEA prohibits American financial institutions from transferring money to Internet gambling sites aside from fantasy sports, horse betting and lottery sites. Players who wish to bypass the law must use third-party venders for money transferring, an obstacle that is prohibitive for many.
Such legislation makes the future of online poker uncertain. Tuveson cites the “instability” of the field as the basis for his decision to return to Penn and finish his degree. Similarly, Steve Jacobs has traded playing poker full-time for Fordham Business School because “the legal landscape is getting trickier and trickier” and he wants a backup plan. Even so, he admits, “As long as there is good money to be made, I will keep playing.”
Yet a recent court case regarding live poker offers some hope for the future of the game: this past January, Judge Thomas James Jr. ruled that poker was not “unlawful gambling” under Pennsylvania Crimes Code because it “is a game where skill predominates over chance.”
Heaslip sits at his desk, connected to PokerStars.com, frenetically clicking through 13 different tables. The software he uses brings each table to the front of the screen when it is his turn. In rapid succession the windows spool to the front; Heaslip makes his moves instantaneously, rarely pausing long enough at a given window to see the outcome of his decision. It doesn’t matter; poker as he plays it is about the long-term, not individual hands.
In 45 minutes, he’s made $80.
Plastered to the wall above Heaslip’s trio of computer monitors — his “command center” — are two quotations. One is from Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker, a book Rick enjoyed so much that he gives a copy to Joe as a gift that afternoon. The other is a comment from one of the online poker forums Rick peruses. It is about a high-stakes player known as Leatherass, who calculated that it costs him $30,000 every year to take bathroom breaks. He now famously urinates into a bottle under his desk.
The forum commenter said: “Life is overrated with so much money if you spend all day angry, peeing in bottles.”
When asked, Heaslip explains that he keeps the quotation above his computer as a reminder that quality of life is just as important, if not more so, than earning money. “I feel like I owe it to the people around me, no matter what my result is any given day, to not either sound like I’m gloating or take it out on them if I’m upset,” Heaslip says. It is this calm logicality that makes his future plans to attend law school unsurprising.
But for now, he’s enjoying the entrepreneurial benefits of playing poker professionally. “In no other job can I sit in my boxers, eat a Pop-Tart, play on my computer while listening to music whenever I feel like it… Really, any hours I choose.”
