Parents For Poker

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Then, of course, there's the money. Like a growing number of poker-playing kids, Jeff got heavily involved in Internet gambling when he went to college. Online poker, with the potential to play many tables at once and the possibility of quickly losing your entire year's tuition in a torrent of bad-luck bits and bytes, can cut both ways. It provides the same emphasis on logic and calculation but lacks the social controls of face-to-face games with friends. It can swallow players up, as in the infamous case of the Lehigh University student who robbed a bank last December to pay off his online-gambling debts. More rarely, a kid can end up with a winning hand. Such was Jeff's case. He parlayed his basement game skills into a brief obsession with online poker, which culminated in his winning a $1.1 million poker tournament in Monte Carlo this March.

Back in Torrance, Ryan and his friends are finishing their game. They have read the instructional books, watched the pros on TV, and are surprisingly good players. At one point Ryan even thought he wanted to be a professional after he leaves high school. But there's no manic intensity to their game. Rather, the boys have a laidback camaraderie, cracking jokes about who's the best liar and paying as much attention to one another as they do to the cards. That camaraderie takes a break when the poker game does and the boys turn to playing video games. Renee made chili dogs for them to nosh on, but the food is all but ignored as the teens rush to the living room to feed what seems to be their true addiction: Guitar Hero on PlayStation 2 and Mario Superstar Baseball on Nintendo GameCube, which they simultaneously start up on two adjacent television sets. There's no more small talk, just grunted taunts and the occasional "Not now!" thrown at any adults who try to intrude. Small wonder that more parents are putting their money on poker.

Are your kids in danger of gambling too much? For a risk assessment, see time.com/gambling