Greg Hogan is far from the only college student to see the game's role in his life grow from a hobby to a destructive obsession. Researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center interviewed a random sample of 880 college students and found that 1 out of every 4 of the 160 or so online gamblers in the study fit the clinical definition of a pathological gambler, suggesting that college online-poker addicts may number in the hundreds of thousands. Many, like Lauren Patrizi, a 21-year-old senior at Loyola University in Chicago, have had weeks when they're playing poker during most of their waking hours. Rarely leaving their rooms, they take their laptops with them to bed, fall asleep each night in the middle of a hand and think, talk and dream nothing but poker. By the time Patrizi finally quit, the game seemed to be both the cause of all her problems and her only means of escaping them. "I kept on playing so I wouldn't have to look at what poker had done to my bank account, my relationships, my life," she told me.

Other addicts, like Alex Alkula, a 19-year-old living outside Columbus, Ohio, decide to "go pro," drop out of school and wind up broke and sleeping on their friends' couches. Alkula, who left the Art Institute of Pittsburgh after five months, now makes his living dealing hold 'em in private home games and organizing tournaments in bars. Having overdrawn four bank accounts, Alkula can no longer play online himself. But when he gets home from work at 3 or 4 in the morning, he turns on his computer, clicks on Full Tilt Poker and watches the players' cards flicker on the screen until dawn. "I can't get away from it," he told me. "And really, I don't want to. I'll keep playing poker even if it means being broke for the rest of my life. I've fallen in love with the game."

In its outline, Hogan's story closely resembles that of the stereotypical compulsive gambler. Before the rise of online poker, however, such a story typically involved a man in his 30's or 40's and took a decade or more to run its course. Greg Hogan, on the other hand, went from class president to bank robber in 16 months. His fall took place not at the blackjack table or the track but within the familiar privacy of his computer screen, where he was seldom more than a minute away from his next hand of poker. He'd been brought up too well to waste himself in some smoky gambling den and knew too much to play a mere game of chance. He wanted to compete against his peers, to see his superior abilities yield dollars for the first time, a transaction he equated with adulthood. His stubborn faith in his own ability — a trait that had served him so well through his first 19 years — proved to be his undoing.

Today's ruined gamblers are often too young to know any better — too young, in fact, to legally gamble in most U.S. casinos. Until now, these young addicts were ignored by the news media, which swooned over the top of the poker pyramid, the Chris Moneymakers and the ESPN heroes, the guys in the wraparound sunglasses and the cowboy hats who made the hustler's art seem somehow noble and athletic. No one was interested in whose losses keep the poker economy humming, not until a Baptist minister's son robbed a bank.





A minister's eldest boy learns to perform early in life. On Sundays, Greg's mother, Karen, would dress him and his two brothers in matching slacks and blazers and take them and their sister to hear Greg Sr. preach. The congregation looked on as the boys followed Greg Jr.'s polite, attentive example. Schooled at home through eighth grade, the straw-haired, blue-eyed boy emulated his father's steady gaze, the soft but firm quality in his voice. He saw that others would come to rely on him if he revealed only his strongest side. When Greg Sr. ran for City Council, Greg Jr. enlisted his playmates to help him campaign door to door. Neighbors began calling Greg "the General." When it came to music, Greg was like a boat on a still pond — one small push from his parents and he'd glide on toward the goal. Karen, a psychiatric nurse, started him on the piano at 5. Greg Sr. worked a second job to help pay for $50-an-hour private music lessons for his daughter and three boys. By 13, Greg had twice played onstage at Carnegie Hall. Music won him a scholarship to the prestigious University School, a day school outside Cleveland, where his classmates noticed his oddly mature ways and dubbed him "the 30-year-old man." By graduation, he'd developed something of an ego. "Greg will always be a people person," wrote his adviser in an evaluation letter. "Perhaps he should set his sights a little lower and just become president of the United States."

For college, he chose Lehigh, a school of 6,600 overlooking Bethlehem, Pa., across the river from Allentown, the crumbling county seat, which has pinned its hopes of revival on a new slots casino set to open by 2008. Lehigh's campus is laid out like a Swiss ski village. Long, winding roads curve up past the library and the chapel to the giant Greek houses, the centers of the campus's social life. Scattered among them are parking lots filled with Nissans, Infinitis and a smattering of Audis, BMW's and Hummers. Text messages fly between cellphones, lighting up with news of which parties are still live and which have been shut down, as many have been since Lehigh was recently named America's No. 3 party school by The Princeton Review. Fraternities now post sentries outside their houses on weekend nights, with the threat of a raid generally intensifying the partying within.

Hogan, who had palled around with the sons of bank executives at his high school, threw himself into this new environment. Even before his father had said goodbye to head back to Ohio, Greg announced his plan to run for class president. He played his first hands of live hold 'em with real money that night, a way to break the ice with the guys from his hall in the dorm lounge. A few weeks later, guided by one of his roommate's friends, Hogan opened his first online-poker account at PokerStars.com. He chose a screen name that would carry his new school's banner all around the world: geelehigh. He'd met someone from two floors down who had lost $100 — a fortune, it seemed — online. He decided to stick to the play-money tables. Within 10 minutes, Hogan was playing his first online hands.