Rick Heaslip clears between $500 and $1,000 an hour on a good day. Heaslip, a College junior, plays poker professionally when he's not studying Asian-American war literature or working toward his English major.
Heaslip is a member of a community of Penn students who play professional or semi-professional poker in person and online. He started just over a year ago, despite initial concerns from his parents.
"At first, they thought I was going to degenerate," Heaslip said, but they stopped worrying after he started shouldering his college debt.
But some worry that recent rulings by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to allow the construction of the Sugarhouse and Foxwoods casinos in Philadelphia will endanger less-skilled players or compulsive gamblers.
Terry Elman, the education coordinator at the New Jersey Center for Compulsive Gambling, says he's seen a noticeable rise in college-age gamblers in the last few years. Gamblers ages 18 to 25 make up 18 percent of the calls his organization receives.
Elman attributes the rise to the televising and promotion of Texas Hold'em tournaments, the game that Heaslip plays.
The arrival of Foxwoods and Sugarhouse is particularly problematic, Elman said, because research "shows that the amount of problem gambling doubles within 50 miles of gambling venues."
Even more dangerous, he said, is that some students "drop out of classes and get refunds for classes and use that to pay off gambling debt, so parents think they're still paying for school."
The result is that students can owe tens of thousands of dollars when they have no steady income.
Tim, who will be a College sophomore in the fall and asked that his last name not be used for personal safety reasons, has been gambling since high school, and took a leave of absence last year to gamble internationally.
He said he gambles between two and nine hours a day and has accumulated a bankroll of close to a million dollars.
"It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of self control," he said.
Even so, Heaslip and Tim agree that gambling can have serious consequences.
"It's depressing seeing people waste their lives away on a slot machine," Heaslip said.
But he and other Penn poker players argue that because the game is between individuals, rather than a machine or against a house dealer, poker is one of the few ways players can gamble and consistently come out ahead.
"It's all about money management," Heaslip said, adding that he tracks every hand and game he plays online with software to analyze his playing style, and that he never bets more than 5 percent of his total earnings in a single game.
But for every dollar Tim and Heaslip win, another player loses - and not all students are as successful.
Wharton junior Zhibo Wang said he played poker for income during his freshman year, but after losing several hundred dollars he stopped gambling.
"I had to borrow money to eat and pay it back with money from the next semester," he said. Now, instead of playing the 15 hours a week he averaged as a freshman, he plays once or twice a month, or with friends "who won't try to keep the game going [after I've run out of money]."
