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Poker playing university students hope to hit it big

By FreedomAtStake | View all Posts
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 09:41 AM

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A surprisingly well-balanced story appeared this morning in the Vancouver Sun.

The story concerns the amazing popularity of online poker at local universities, with one student claiming there are "thousands of players" at his university.

The story refreshingly doesn't concern itself deeply with the social and moral implications of students gambling online. We'll wait and see what kind of response this story provokes from the public. I'm willing to bet tomorrow's opinion section will be riddled with shocked and outraged responses.

I suspect the reason why the story is so positive is most likely because the reporter was unable to find any students who have been negatively affected by online poker. It's tough to go negative when the people you are interviewing are not only having fun and apparently not suffering financially (the article doesn't say), but are actually finding employment from the craze.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of students wasting their time gambling when they should be studying, but if they weren't doing this they'd probably be spending all of their time playing Guitar Hero anyway.

But consider this story to be a sign of the times. People, even college students, CAN entertain themselves relatively harmlessly by gambling online. I am assuming that these students are all old enough to gamble online, since they were able to sign up and therfore had access to valid credit cards, etcetera.

Altogether, I applaud the Vancouver Sun for this story angle.

The more often the public gets exposed to the non-negative side of online gambling, the less suspicious they become.

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User:	Freedom@Stake
Joined:	July 1995
Location:	Ireland
Team:	Florida State Seminoles
Occupation:	Media

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