Addiction to online poker games is a genuine problem, especially amongst young people in college today. Poker games are fun and offer the potential to win money, and now, thanks to easy access to the Internet, they are readily available to any seeker. The presence of such easily accessible poker games has sped up the normal pattern of gambling addiction that has been seen and diagnosed for years. Instead of men of their 30’s or 40’s building up to a climactic terrible turn of events after a decade or so filled with poker games, now, men and women in their early twenties or even late teens are losing themselves to endless tides of poker games.
As reported in the New York Times article, “the Hold-’Em Holdup,” in June of 2006, there are any number of young individuals who have the same kind of terrible, life-shattering addiction that one would have only previously expected to see after years of playing poker games in smoky, poorly lit rooms. Greg Hogan, Jr., a 19-year-old sophomore at Lehigh University, wound up attempting a bank robbery on a spur of the moment whim, in order to pay back debts he had incurred from his numerous online poker games. Alex Alkula, a 19-year-old, decided to drop out of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in order to make his fame and fortune playing poker games, and instead found himself barely scraping by, sleeping on friends’ couches.
The nature of poker games is that they are addictive and deceiving, or otherwise they wouldn’t be so effective at generating money for either the numerous sites that employ them, or for the casinos that feature them. Players need to win often enough and large enough that they believe they have a shot of making a lot of money, only to find out too late that the more poker games they play, the less likely they are to have actually come out ahead. Online poker games magnify the problem tenfold; gone are the pauses in between games for shuffling, or any of the other numerous physical actions that might cause a temporary lapse in game play. Instead, the poker games function quickly, easily, automatically, with very little hiccup between each one, allowing a player to go through dozens of games with ease, even playing multiple poker games at the same time.
The fact that the poker game system in generally depends upon individuals who either don’t have the skill to realize that they don’t have much skill, or who don’t mind consistent losses, leads one to question the ethics of the entire affair. Essentially, for all that poker games are entertaining and fun, their long-running sustainability is based on a con, a deception. About 1 in 10 of those who consistently play poker games will actually succeed at making money in the long run, and poker games function by feeding off the hope of those who believe that they will successfully be that one in ten. In the end, the danger of poker games has always been present, but it has never reached such a height as it has now, with the advent of online poker games. It seems that the only way to curb the growing danger of the games is to take action of a different form, to educate individuals about the reality of poker games, online or otherwise. Knowledge is the key to defeating deception, like that which is inherent to the functioning of poker games; while poker games need not be abolished at all, players should be made aware of the dangers in pursuing these fleeting entertainments too vehemently.