The gambling habit consuming three nights a week of Ian’s (name has been changed) life began when the Weinberg sophomore was 15. He and his friends started a Friday night poker tradition, betting $5 at a time, then $10, then $20. Emboldened by a friend’s success on Poker Star, a popular betting Web site, Ian bought his own account. “I knew I was about as good as he was, so I started playing and started making some money online, and I kept going from there,” he says. Today Ian plays poker for six hours at a time, betting up to $1,000 a night.
Four to 8 percent of college students struggle with gambling addiction, says Dr. David Shor, a staff psychologist at Northwestern’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), and NU students are no exception. He treats three or four students a year for problem gambling and says more are likely doing it secretly. Last Friday, Claire Brown’s article for The Daily brought to light the prevalence of gambling at Northwestern. The stories of Ian and James, another Weinberg sophomore, illustrate how serious gambling habits develop and progress.
Shor identifies two signs that indicate a gambling problem. First, “if it’s in any way interfering with things you’d be doing otherwise, getting in the way of relationships and productivity,” he says. And secondly, “if they’re gambling money that they really can’t afford to lose.” Ian says he’s in control of his gambling, but he admits to consistently holing up in his room to play online poker. “You really can’t move around a lot, because the hands are constantly coming,” the Weinberg sophomore says. “You have to just be in your room and maybe make a really quick run during breaks because you get five-minute breaks every hour to sprint down, get some food and then come back up.”
The difference Ian sees between himself and problem gamblers is that he doesn’t fit Shor’s second criterion: He knows when to stop. “I don’t enjoy the thrill of gambling as much as some people I know,” he says. “You can really tell when you’re playing with them that they love risking chips.”
Weinberg sophomore James (name has been changed) says he is one of those people. Like Ian, he started gambling by making small bets with his friends. “I noticed a trend where I really liked to put money on the line,” he says. “It really just built up and culminated in me getting into gambling.” Until a month-and-a-half ago, he gambled four to six hours a day with whatever money he had. “I would take my paycheck and I would say, it’s not money that I really, really need right now,” he says. “It was to the point that I would literally have almost no money starting the year for food.”
Like Ian’s betting, James’s was solitary. When he went to casinos in his hometown, he always went alone. Friends joked about it, but he says they assumed he was spending $25 or $50 – not hundreds.
“People who are problem gamblers, it’s something that you don’t ever really tell anybody,” James says. He didn’t stop until after he had reduced his savings to a couple hundred dollars. Since then he hasn’t gambled but has begun trading stocks. “It’s fun and it gives me the same excitement,” he says.
If Ian’s college gambling goes well, he says, he imagines roaming the world, playing poker by day and spending his winnings at night. But Shor cautions most problem gamblers have unrealistic ideas about their abilities. “They have this illusion that they’re going to be in control and able to affect the outcome of their bets,” he says. “Poker comes the closest to really feeding that illusion because there is a skill element.”
