It's another poker night, and Matt Bartkowski has just pulled off a great bluff with a lousy hand of a 6 and a 9. He dons a pair of boxing gloves, waves them in the air and hoots like the 16-year-old he is.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Thomas Jefferson High School students play poker on a day off. From right, Mike Pappas, 15, a 10th-grader, throws into the pot as he plays with A. J. Ross, 15, 10th grade, and Dan Braun, 15, 9th grade. Click photo for larger image.

Several hands later, his hockey pal Tony Valerino fingers his chips and blurts out a confession: "I lose all my profit margin at Wendy's. It's amazing. You can play two hands for a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger."

These Mt. Lebanon boys are playing Texas Hold'Em, the poker game that has swept the nation and has trickled down to teenagers who wear sunglasses and roll chips with the swagger of pros like Daniel Negreanu. If you listen to their boyish banter, you might think teenage boys are just playing for fast-food change, but some of them will walk away with much more.

Without mowing a blade of grass or shoveling a flake of snow, Valerino won $720 playing poker almost daily in the summer, including $137 from a nine-hour game. (Alas, he has lost his golden touch after taking two months off).

Joe Petruska, 17, another of the eight players at this game, recently used $300 of his summer poker earnings to buy a guitar.

And Rick Beuke, 16, plays well enough to stash his $400 take this past year inside a flower pot in his bedroom.

Beuke, the host of this game, says a few teenagers might get hooked on poker, but most are just having fun.

"If they lose, they still go home and have a house and everything," Beuke says. "If you spend $10 on a Friday night of poker, you are entertaining yourself."

Fun or threat?

Poker, it seems, is everywhere these days. On TV screens. In volunteer fire hall tables. On office computers.

The game is so mainstream that if you walk into KB Toys, you will see poker chip sets across the aisle from the Fisher-Price Tickle 'n Teach Porcupine. Boys as young as 11 are betting for money, addiction experts say, because the game is glamorized so much on ESPN and other TV channels. Some teenage boys find it more exciting to watch than football.

Is it fun or addiction?

"Instead of whipping out the Monopoly boards, more and more kids are saying, 'Let's play Texas Hold'Em,'" says Jeffrey Derevensky, co-director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors at McGill University in Montreal.

Addiction experts are divided on whether this is a fairly innocuous fad or the latest worrisome youth trend.

Derevensky says 4 to 6 percent of youth in North America have a serious gambling addiction, double the rate of adults. While there is no breakout for poker addicts, he has treated a 17-year-old who lost $1,800 a month playing poker in after-hour clubs and others who go to bed dreaming of hands they should have played. "What starts as a simple social get together escalates into wagering with money they don't have."

He tells parents not to let their teenagers play for money because they have trouble setting limits. "Most parents view gambling as relatively innocuous, not as bad as other stuff," he says. "Yet if you talk to an individual who has had gambling problems, and many have had drug or alcohol problems too, they say the worst addiction is gambling."

But Ken Winters, professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, sees no problem with parents supervising home poker games with teenagers and their friends.

"There are a lot of reasons not to pathologize this fad," he said. "There are a lot worse things teenagers can be doing with their free time -- binge drinking, drug use and driving around in cars under the influence and speeding. It requires more brain activity than other things kids do with their free time, such as watching TV."

Teenagers have bet on cards for decades, he says, without ending up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings. "I don't see it as having addictive potential for the overwhelming majority of teenagers" the way drugs do, says Winters, who believes the youth gambling statistics are inflated.

But he advises parents to set loss limits such as $10 per player per game.

Torey Beuke, the mother of Rick, monitors his gambling. She refused Rick's request to set up an online credit card account for him even though he offered to give her the $50 to fund it.

"Forget it. This is ridiculous," she told him.

"I had a fear it would get out of hand. I don't mind if he plays with his friends. It's a great social activity.

"He is pretty cautious," she says. "There are times he could lose $20, but he does win. That is the kicker about gambling. You think it is easy. You think you win because of skill, not luck. If it were that easy, we would all quit our jobs."

Torey and her husband, Richard, prefer the social interaction of poker games over video games and instant messaging. His sons' games remind Richard of the "nickle-dime-quarter" games he played in the '60s and '70s.

Chips, nerves, big talk

On a recent night at the Beuke house, the game's allure is evident. Between playful trash talking, you could almost feel the adrenaline rush as the momentum shifts between the hockey players gambling after a team dinner.

Beuke wins an early hand, neatly clinks down his chips and says, "One of the best things about poker is stacking chips."

His friend talks about one kid who is addicted and whose mother, he says, subsidizes his $40-a-night Hold'em habit.

"If your Mom gives you money," Beuke says, "there is no incentive to stop."

Bueke is going through his own money faster than usual this game. Two and half hours into the game, a player across the table says, "Beuke is so quiet. Usually he never stops talking."

A polite honor student who is wearing a Detroit Tigers cap, Beuke has won $70 the past five days, but is on his way to losing $30 in three hours. Because the game is at his house, he has broken his rule to leave the game once he lost $20. As he buys another $10 worth of chips, he says, "It's really annoying to watch other people play. It's not like you can leave."

Steve Millhouse, a 16-year-old wearing goggles he found, says, "When I lose, my mother always says, 'How much did you make?' I say, 'I had fun.'"

Everyone laughs knowingly.

Millhouse is bemoaning the fact that he is going to lose, and wishes he had stopped when he was up by $8. "I should have cashed out," says Millhouse. "I should have cashed out. I should have cashed out."

But he plays one final hand, where everyone else folds but him and Bartkowski. The chips fly as the other players hoot. Millhouse wins with a pair of jacks over Bartkowski's 10 and 9. He is up $20, less than the $45 of the winner, but enough to salvage the night.

"I want to thank everyone who helped me win money," Millhouse says as he scoops up the chips giddily.

Before walking out of the game room, Millhouse says, "The nerves are still jumping."

Boys will be boys

Some girls know the river from the turn card, but teenage poker players are overwhelmingly male, gambling experts say.

"Boys certainly tend to do it more often and earlier and with more money," says Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. Derevensky says girl gambling is on the rise, too, but young women are more likely to wager on sports bets and on lottery tickets.

Jessica Viola, 17, a student at North Hills High School, plays poker only occasionally. "It's mostly the guys. They rip each other off and take each others' money."

Her younger brother, Frank, 14, doesn't have much money, so he only bets about $10 a month on poker. He and his ninth grade friends at North Hills Junior High School goof around, pretending like they are the poker pros on TV. "Everyone acts like we are grown up," he says. "We mess around with each other. We act like we run the place. We pretend we have poker faces. We put the glasses on."

Derevensky says poker pros on shows such as ESPN's "World Series of Poker" are so appealing because they represent "rags-to-riches fame. It is glamour brought to everyday life. They look like bums. They wear their baseball caps turned around. This is not Pierce Brosnan walking in with a tuxedo."

Tim Giangarlo, 16, of Jefferson Hills, prefers watching poker to football on TV. "It's really exciting to watch. You can go in with the worst cards and win. You can go in with the best cards and lose. The worst player in the world can win. The worst football player in the world can't win."

On a recent day, Giangarlo wolfs down some Cocoa Puffs before playing a for-fun game with his friends, soccer pals from Thomas Jefferson High School. Giangarlo wins this game inside the Pleasant Hills home of his friend because he is loose. No money was exchanged. Lacking a good poker face, he does better when he plays for-fun games or online.

The previous night he and his friends had lost $10 each to Mike Pappas, 15, who walked away $70 richer.

"I like to bluff," says Pappas. "I'm kind of calm. They don't know if I have a good hand or bad hand. I get invited to people's houses to play a lot."

But once a teenager gets too good, other kids don't want to play with them. Joe DiCicco, 18, of North Fayette, has that problem.

He is skilled enough to compete against adults in the Lebanese Club in Aliquippa, where he placed sixth out of 91 in one major tournament.

His nerves are on end playing at that level. "I go and see adults who drop $100 to $150 a night without batting an eye. I lose $20 and I cry."

He likes playing with friends at West Allegheny High School on weekends, but some kids have stopped inviting him to games.

"It's kind of bad in a way," DiCicco says. "They don't want me to take their money anymore."