The Journal

Issue date: 3/2/06 Section: LifeStyle

Media Credit: DAVID TROTMAN-WILKINS / Knight Ridder Newspapers Surrounded by chips and cards, Buffalo Grove entrepreneurs, Craig Rabin, left, and Jason Beck, sponsors of Collegiate Poker Tour Events Inc., offer collegiate poker tournaments of Texas Hold-em.

CHICAGO - The bond between buddies Craig Rabin and Jason Beck is obvious, particularly in the way they tend to finish the dangling end of each other's sentences.

The way Beck tells it, he called Rabin as soon as he got the idea in 2004 to start a business that would host free college poker tournaments at which students would compete for scholarships. It didn't matter that the pair was separated by more than a thousand miles, with Beck in college in Miami and Rabin at Illinois State University in Normal.

Rabin picks up the story: "I was like, 'This is a great idea.' So I had this business class that was on small business ownership. We had to create a fake company. But I was thinking, why create a fake hot dog stand when we have got this great idea?"

Since eighth grade, Beck and Rabin have talked about running a business together. Now, less than a year after graduating from college with business degrees, they are hosting free traveling Texas Hold 'Em poker tournaments at six universities. In April they will hold an online national championship with a scholarship prize pool of up to $20,000.

The budding entrepreneurs have succeeded in avoiding the corporate nine-to-five, but they are entering controversial territory in bringing a "legitimized" version of poker onto
university campuses.

"With any poker event, there are going to be some reservations about gambling," Beck said. "But the students don't pay a cent to enter our tournaments, and everyone wins at least a small prize."

Beck and Rabin aim to ride the poker wave; there has been an enormous growth in the game's popularity in general and in college poker, in particular, during the past few years.

There are about 3 million young people, between ages 14 and 22, who gamble at cards on a weekly basis, according to a recent study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. About half of the males attending college gamble at cards at least once a month, the research showed.

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