Students of the Game
When poker started to become a popular pastime here, revitalising Britain's cardrooms and taking over cable television, one demographic in particular caught the bug early. Who has the time, enthusiasm, and money (at least at the beginning of the term) to practise this easy-to-learn, hard-to-perfect game? Students. In the UK alone, student poker has gone from a rare activity undertaken surreptitiously with "chips" fashioned from differently coloured pasta shapes, played for pennies, to a seriously organised set of young people gathering experience at an alarming rate and getting an education in gambling along with their degrees. Inspired by the financial successes of their mainly Scandinavian counterparts, who can be seen online any day of the week playing at the highest levels while still a good two years away from being allowed to sit down at a table legally in Las Vegas, students were among the first to jump on the poker-boom bandwagon in this country.
It was the advent of
Late Night Poker that got the ball rolling for the Oxford Poker Society, one of the first to start running its own tournaments, and introduce its members to some pro players who were probably as amused to find themselves invited to speak to the eager youth as the youth were to contemplate playing poker as a possible livelihood. I remember in its earliest days playing, on a coffee table in a common room with metal washers, some kind of no-limit hold'em tournament in which the blinds were not raised and rulings were debated as they came up. Now, students are as likely to take up poker - quickly educated by their peers, and, more importantly, the Internet - as any other extracurricular pastime.
Although those first half-dozen players in Oxford had already discovered the cash game by 1999, it is the tournament format that has undoubtedly been most popularised by television, from the
European Poker Tour to the
World Series of Poker, and this style of poker is what brings students in different universities together in organised groups. These tentative beginnings have resulted in one of the most successful series of student tournaments ever; the yearly Oxford Cup is now run in the palatial Randolph Hotel, attracting more than 200 runners. Among the poker celebrities who have graced this tournament are Simon Trumper, Dave Colclough, and even Phil Hellmuth, who was coaxed over one year to the delight of the students, who kept him playing a 10p-20p no-limit hold'em cash game for many hours after his elimination from (and subsequent commentary on) the tournament itself.
It was the hard work of a few individuals - most notably, Joe Barnard, its first president - that turned the Oxford Poker Society into what is now part of the worldwide University Poker League. This umbrella covers more than 40 societies in the UK alone, from Birmingham to Warwick, with fellow student groups in Canada, Australia, and South Africa. As they say in their mission statement, "Poker is accepted worldwide as a game of skill, and in the student world especially, there is a constant drive toward developing the most beneficial strategies in the game." As members of any niche forum will know, debating points of interest and generally having a group of enthusiasts to practise them on (in the case of online student tournaments, this is especially relevant) can only be a benefit.
Quite apart from the UPL, other companies have now started targeting students when it comes to marketing online cardrooms. For every hundred students who sign up to play, for example, in student-only freerolls, some reasonable percentage will in all probability move on to play for real, and maybe one or two will become "proper" high-ranking players who are prized in the highly competitive, near-saturated world of online poker rooms. The future loyalty of today's students is surely a valuable asset to any online site, and I can see competition for their interest heating up in the coming years. That is not to say that offers for students benefit only the companies with whom they're linked; the
Irish National Student Poker Championship 2007 promises a "
World Series-style structure and a buy-in to suit any pocket," something I would have jumped at the chance to play in while a student. The catch is that winnings are paid into a Pacific Poker account, which must be set up to take part, although it's not as though students are any less fickle when it comes to their choice of online poker rooms than established players. Sites will have to continue to provide incentives and good live events to keep the attention (and money) of their new recruits.
This is all in stark contrast to the U.S., where, quite apart from the online ban, students aren't even allowed in the door of a cardroom, and have to travel to Europe to get a game before their 21st birthday. The conclusion on this side of the Atlantic, however, is that students are going to be spoiled for choice in the new year when it comes to online offers and special events, and if they can stay away from the twin pitfalls of (extra) debt and the temptation to "postpone" the rest of their degrees to take their chances as under-bankrolled online pros or jump into the pricey European tournament circuit, there's plenty of opportunity out there to learn on the fast track and make money at the same time.
Jen Mason is part of www.blondepoker.com. She is responsible for its live tournament coverage in the UK and abroad.
