SF Chronicle Poker Feature Underscores Vice

Yesterday's Chronicle contained a feature article on the rapid growth of poker, both in Bay Area cardrooms and on the Internet, fueled by television programming such as the World Poker Tour and ESPN's WSOP coverage. The article profiles local player Tony Esfandiari.

On his way to work, slim, slick-haired and goateed Antonio Esfandiari, a young San Franciscan wearing sweats and sandals, carries a large red ice chest stuffed with a bounty – poached wild salmon, stuffed chicken, pasta, spicy tuna rolls, French bread, pears and raspberries, an energy bar and carrot juice.

"I'm going to work a lot today," he explains, as if blowing $50 at Whole Foods is an everyday thing to do.

With that, he steps into a small booth, asks for his safety deposit box, casually removes six chips worth $1,000 each, and moves toward his workstation:

the high-stakes Texas Hold'em game at Lucky Chances in Colma. Here, on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to whenever, the minimum buy-in is a cool grand, and should you feel good about drawing Big Slick, you can bet everything you've got. So what's $50 to avoid a casino steak?

Esfandiari, often, at 24, the youngest player in the room, has decided to be a professional poker player. He is careful to say, however, that he does not consider himself a gambler, describing games that require less skill as "the dark side," inhabited by "the sick f–." Esfandiari says he simply senses opportunity – to make money off a Vegas lifestyle many young men covet.

A companion article profiles former world champion and Palo Alto resident Phil Hellmuth, Jr.

Journalist Demian Bulwa's coverage is not starry-eyed wonder at the glamorous life of a poker pro. While his article is pretty much factually correct, the language he uses is loaded with value judgments – and it is clear that poker is not one of his values.

Bay area cardrooms are "seducing new players." Bulwa hints that poker might have been a factor in Ben Affleck's breakup with Jennifer Lopez. Poker tournaments "bring a bit of heroin to a lottery-loving world." Poker is "an addictive game." He even quotes a New Jersey anti-gambling activist who says "They don't build casinos so you can take the money home, and they don't put up these Internet sites so you can go on and win the money."

Reading this article, you might think that poker is the new crack, with the vast profits taken from helpess addicts going not to Colombian coca barons but to maintainers of Costa Rican server farms.

I'm no polyanna about the social and psychological consequences of compulsive gambling. These problems are real, and people get badly hurt – both gamblers and their families.

Bulwa's article, though, reads as if he went into it with an attitude, like he intended to do a hatchet job. It is about as appropriate to emphasize the risks of gambling in a feature on poker's growth as it would be to emphasize the dangers of alcoholism in a feature on the growing popularity of microbreweries.

In the long run, poker players with more skills are going to win money from those with less skills. Luck is a factor, and a big one in the short term – and a good thing, too, because unless the weaker players get lucky now and then, they have no incentive to keep playing. With more and more people coming to the game of poker, more and more of them are going to lose money. And some of them will develop into problem gamblers. It's the nature of the game. Poker is a living illustration of Gore Vidal's dictum, "It's not enough to succeed; others must fail."

But just as there will be losers, there will also be winners. So far, over the six years that I've been playing cardroom poker, I've been one of the winners.