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Jay Koeller's wife, Judy, is the woman of many men's fantasies: she encouraged her husband to take up poker.
After watching a winner pocket $1 million on a TV tournament five years ago, "she said, 'You can do that,' " says Koeller, 63. "So little by little, I started learning poker, and I found I was good at it."
Good enough that last year the Melbourne, Fla., resident took the $14,700 second-place money in a tournament—an online tournament, that is.
Koeller, a retired paint contractor, is among the growing number of people age 50-plus visiting the Internet to play poker, slots, roulette and bingo. National statistics on their prevalence aren't available. But as the percentage of people ages 50 to 64 using computers has grown—from less than 40 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2006—so has the share of older people's calls to gambling hotlines regarding addiction issues with Internet play. In the last three years, for example, that share has risen from 8 percent to 13 percent for the Florida Compulsive Gambling Hotline.
Some experts fear that online gambling's constant availability and its high level of privacy might increase gambling addiction. Those concerns were partly behind a law—the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act—that President Bush signed last year to discourage online gambling by outlawing financial transactions between banks and websites that offer gambling. (Describing that law as "an inappropriate interference on the personal freedom of Americans," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has introduced the Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act of 2007, which would exempt properly licensed operators.)
Many online gamers differ from their casino counterparts in at least one important way: they tend to have a harder time forging new relationships in the face-to-face world, says Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa.
"Someone over 50 likely has their family, their neighborhood, their church, and may even have a network of activities, but they find it easier to go to an Internet gaming table and meet someone online than they do going out of the house [to gamble]," Young says.
For his part, Koeller says, the 24/7 convenience of online poker attracted him, as did the accessibility of a vast network of players. He admits to having a compulsive personality. Constantly striving to improve his game, he spends as many as 12 hours a day playing poker online and reading and thinking about poker strategy.
He's also adamant that he doesn't have a gambling problem. When he began gambling online, he set a $2,000 loss limit. If that stake ever dwindles to zero, he'll quit for good.
"I've never had to stop because I never lost the money," Koeller says. "I would never put more money at risk, and I would never chase losses."
Besides, he says, "most decisions made in life are a gamble."
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