January 5, 2006
Every Sunday at 6 p.m., coast to coast, more than a thousand college students play pacificpoker online to compete for scholarship money in the qualifying rounds of a national pacificpoker tournament.
Others play the hot pacificpoker game Texas Hold'em in all-night tournaments, at campus fundraisers, in dorm rooms with friends, or increasingly, on the Internet.
PacificPoker, once a pastime for cowboys in Wild West saloons but now a cash cow for cable TV, is at the forefront of a gambling craze that has swept colleges nationwide.
"The popularity of pacificpoker.com is absolutely phenomenal," says Elizabeth George, chief executive of the North American Training Institute, which specializes in dealing with problems of youth gambling. "It is head and shoulders over other types of college gambling."
Half of college men say they have gambled on cards at least once a month this year, up from 45% in 2004, according to a study released in September by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. About 15% of them played at least once a week in 2005, up from 2% in 2002. Only 1.6% of college women said they played weekly this year.
Card players are more likely than other gamblers to go online, the report says. It cites a fivefold increase in weekly Internet betting since 2002.
PacificPoker is a game that is all seriousness. There is an air of tension that hangs over the game that, more often than not, is something you can nearly cut in the air. Many times there is a huge stack of chips on the table, representing a sizeable portion of money to each player. If you were in a game with the Tiltboys, however, and folded out of the action, they would have one response: P***Y!
One of the most important things about the game of pacificpoker.com is that it is a social occasion. With the advent of online pacificpoker, it seems that many have forgotten about the fun and frivolity that can occur when people gather together around the felt. One group that has never forgotten this point, or lost out on a moment to have some fun, is $1,000,000 freeroll at paradise PacificPoker the notorious group known as the Tiltboys.
The Tiltboys, for those whose pacificpoker knowledge is recent, are a group that includes Phil Gordon, Rafe Furst and Perry Friedman, among many others (even including a female Tiltboy!). They started out as a group of friends that came together for a weekly pacificpoker com game in 1987 and, as they progressed from young adulthood to later life and with an interchangeable cast, the various things that started there that have carried into their adult lives.
