Unlike most college students who work as waiters, store clerks, or university tour guides, Jonathan Wanchalk played online poker in order to earn his fare share of pocket money.

“I was making $175 an hour. If I just play a couple hours a day, it’s ridiculously good especially when you are going to college and some kids are working for six bucks [an hour],” Wanchalk said.

Still below the legal gambling age in the U.S., the 19-year-old Wanchalk diversified his income by launching his website onlinepokersitereviews.org—an online poker junky’s paradise that offers video reviews of poker sites voiced by Wanchalk, written reviews, and more.

The Internet has helped make gambling more accessible for underage hopefuls.

But how can Wanchalk play online poker and invest himself in the industry when he can’t even step foot in a U.S. casino?

The simple answer: the Internet. With offices located outside U.S. borders, online poker sites follow the typical international gambling age of 18. Not only does the Internet open online gambling to U.S. underage hopefuls, it makes poker more accessible, as well.

“You can just go online, sign up, pay, and get going and not have to worry about all those other factors,” Coleen Moore, the Marketing and Admissions Manager at the Illinois Institute of Addiction Recovery, said.

Moore said online poker’s accessibility leads to an increased chance of addiction. Craig Kopulsky, 19, labeled himself as a victim to online poker’s convenience.

“I think I have an addictive personality, so when I start losing, I can’t really stop myself. And it’s [online poker] just fun, it’s a fun way to gamble,” he said.

Besides its convenience, online poker holds many other advantages against its slow, traditional counterpart, like its anonymity.

“And I think that’s the lure of online—is number one, it is just easy and you can really play anonymously where nobody’s going to know who you are,” Jeremy Enke, the 33-year-old CEO of Empire Marketing (an online poker marketing company), said.

Also, online poker erases inefficiencies such as chip counting, allowing for a faster game. That faster game becomes even faster if the player decides to play multiple tables simultaneously.

“You are going to get 100 hands in an hour [at] one table when you are playing online. If you are playing 12 tables, that’s 1,200 hands an hour,” Wanchalk said. “Where at a casino you are only going to be playing 12-14 hands an hour, so you are literally playing literally a 100 times more hands.”

And more hands means more potential earnings.

“The more tables they play, the more money they can make. That’s stuff that you can’t do offline,” Enke said.

But earnings don’t only stem from playing the game. Now an industry, online poker’s popularity opened up many business opportunities.

Enke’s Empire Marketing is one example. His company’s main site, pokeraffiliatelistings.com, strides to increase traffic to many online poker sites, while bringing together numerous poker webmasters to discuss the industry in a forum setting, Enke said. Enke earns profits from online poker companies when players, directed by his websites, sign up at various poker rooms.

While Wanchalk operates a similar site in onlinepokersitereviews.org, he also coaches for money. Analogous to a football coach’s film session, Wanchalk videotapes players’ games and gives his advice.

While the industry continues to grow in the U.S., its future depends heavily on its legality.

“What’s the future? Literally no one knows. It entirely depends on all kinds of legislation,” Wanchalk said.

One piece of legislation, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006, tried to curb online gambling in the U.S. The act confused many and ultimately deterred 29 percent of online poker players, according to Poker Players Research Ltd.

However, the UIGEA only prevents credit card companies and banks from undergoing direct financial transactions with online poker companies.  Meaning a middleman, like the company Neteller, can facilitate transactions between the player and online poker site.

The UIGEA’s uncertainty and inconvenience not only affected the U.S., but it disrupted online poker at an international level, too.

“It’s [UIGEA] not really encouraging the average Joe Self American who just saw the World Series [of Poker] on TV last night to come and lose a few hundred dollars online—that’s what everybody’s looking for,” Ian McDonnell, a 27-year-old Irish professional poker player, said. “Everybody wants those recreational players back at the tables because those recreational players are what keeps [online] poker’s ecosystem running properly.”

McDonnell said since many bad American players stopped playing online due to the UIGEA, games became more challenging.

“I’m hoping and every other poker player for that mind that the gaming bill in the U.S. gets turned around,” he said.

Officially supposed to go into effect Dec. 1, 2009, the U.S. Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve Board delayed the UIGEA until June 1, 2010. Choosing to focus more on his website rather than playing, Wanchalk isn’t taking any chances.

“It’s just stupid though to put a lot of time and effort into something that you are not sure of the future,” Wanchalk said. “It would be like practicing for a basketball team if they were going to outlaw basketball.”

While online poker’s future in the U.S. sits tangled between state and federal regulations, the U.S. government might want to consider recognizing online poker’s legality. The U.S. government could make up to $2.2 billion in tax revenues in 2010 from online gambling, if regulated, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Regardless of U.S. legislation, online poker continues to grow, and college students account for the fastest growing demographic of online gamblers, according to the publication Gambling on Campus.

“I’m actually pretty old school for a[n online] poker player now at the age of 27,” McDonnell said.

Old school or not, McDonnell understands the growth and financial possibilities that the online poker industry presents now and for years to come.

And many of those possibilities depend on how the U.S. decides to play its chips.

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