Newsweek Cover Attacks Online Poker

A new cover from Newsweek features a photo of a child holding a tablet with some sort of online poker game running on the device. Despite holding a royal flush, the child kind of has a look of melancholy on his face.

In big black letters on the bottom reads, “Poker Face.” Since when did your poker face matter when playing online poker?

In all seriousness, the article goes into reporting on why, it argues, online gambling is of a concern to parents in the United States. The article is critical of moves by the Obama Department of Justice to let individual states decide if they want web gambling within their respective borders.

Right now, just Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey have legalized and regulated online gambling. States like California and Pennsylvania are considering legalizing the business in the near future.

Underage gambling is one of the chief concerns of the casino industry, brick-and-mortar and online. Many argue that the online space provides a greater ability to verify the identify of players, and thus check their age. Obviously, a success rate of 100 percent cannot be achieved in either a brick-and-mortar setting or on the Internet, the industry has admitted.

According to the Newsweek article, it’s the younger generations that are at risk.

“The millennials are greater risk takers; they’ve grown up on the technology of video games and watching other young people winning the World Series of Poker [also from Caesars], and they think they are smarter than everyone else,” says Jeffrey Derevensky, a professor of applied child psychology and psychiatry at Montreal’s McGill University and one of the world’s leading authorities on youth gambling addiction. On average, he says, 5 to 8 percent of university students are what he would classify as “at-risk gamblers,” with 2 to 4 percent suffering from “a serious gambling addiction.”

When kids do slip through the cracks, the consequences can be enormous, said Derevensky:

Once hooked, kids can take years to recover—or never recover—with the most severe cases only able to substitute one high-risk behavior for another. Some kids even commit suicide. “Once they’re addicted, these kids will take their parents’ credit cards, gas cards, anything they can find to gamble with,” he says. “I had one kid, being raised by a single mother, who stole two of her credit cards and lost $20,000 on PokerStars in one month.”

Players must be 21 in order to play online in the states in which it’s currently legal.

Proponents of online gambling say the risk is so low and the pros, such as stirring up economic activity and creating high-tech jobs in a state, are too great.

We’ll let you decide for yourself what to make of the Newsweek piece.

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